About
Hi, I am an international student. A few years ago I moved to the U.S. to work on my doctoral studies. From the beginning I realized that I had to spend a considerable amount of time writing, and let’s face it, writing sucks. Trying to fill a blank page that stares at you is hard, but it’s even harder if you have to write in a language that is not your primary language. There are many idiomatic expressions that are difficult to master, and prepositional usage varies from language to language. As Paul Brians, author of Common Errors in English Usage, states:
One of the clearest indications that a person reads little and doesn’t hear much formal English is a failure to use the right preposition in a common expression. You aren’t ignorant to a fact; you’re ignorant of it. Things don’t happen on accident, but by accident (though they do happen “on purpose”). There are no simple rules governing preposition usage: you just have to immerse yourself in good English in order to write it naturally.
I’ve tried to immerse myself in learning and using good English skills for several years now, but sometimes I still write things that do not make much sense. At least, that’s what I am told when I have my work proofread by a friend who is a native speaker. Really? It was so clear to me…
Now you can finally save your and your friend’s time. The Internet is a huge resource filled with examples written in many different languages, and TextRanch is a tool that makes it easy to search through millions of pages to find out how popular an expression is. If you are in doubt, just type your word, phrase, or sentence into TextRanch and you will quickly find out if you are writing something that is part of the language or not. You can compare different alternatives: usually the ones with the most hits are safer to use than the ones with few or zero hits.
I hope you will find TextRanch a useful and easy to use tool. Please leave comments if you want to know more about how it works, or if you would like to see new features implemented.
Thanks for visiting TextRanch.com!