LANGUAGE CENTER - STANFORD UNIVERSITY
As a Tool for Academic Writing
Introduction | Editing Basics | Interpreting Results | Language Research
Introduction
Welcome. This site is the result of several years' experience using Google with my advanced graduate writing class (EFSLANG 698B) at in the English for Foreign Students Program (EFS) at Stanford University. Note that this is not about using Google to conduct web research for information or content. As noted in the introduction, the focus here is on Google as a language tool, to help you identify conventional English usage. Sometimes "conventional" means "correct" in the sense that it is identical to what you find in grammar books and dictionaries. Sometimes it differs from what you'd find in a grammar book or dictionary, but mostly it just covers what you can't find there.
Note: if you are using this in a language class, be sure to follow what your teacher says about it. With over eight billion web pages to draw from, you may be getting many different varieties of English. You'll want to make sure you're drawing examples from an appropriate one given your class requirements.
Even if you are using this on your own, be careful. There are a lot of reasons why the English forms you find on the web are not the best ones for the use you may intend them.
You may already use Google or some other search engine regularly for doing research. That's what we're doing here, but it's a different kind of research
The rest of this Google for students section is divided into three parts:
In learning to harness some of the power of Google for these purposes, you may discover that not only does it assist you in those areas, but that as a bonus your ability to use Google to search for information is significantly enhanced.