LANGUAGE CENTER - STANFORD UNIVERSITY
As a Tool for Academic Writing
Introduction | Editing Basics | Interpreting Results | Language Research
Introduction to Editing
There are two good times to use Google to improve the English in your papers. One is after you receive feedback from a writing instructor or someone else that a particular usage of yours, usually a word or phrase, is "wrong" or at least questionable. The other is when you are editing on your own.
In the first case, someone else has done at least part of the work for you. You can use the Google techniques described in Google Basics or below to hunt for better forms (assuming you don't know how to fix the problem immediately once it's pointed out). The problem is more difficult when you have to do everything yourself. Below are a few tips on how to do this, but keep in mind that mostly your skill in using Google for this purpose will improve with practice.
Let's assume you have completed revising your paper for organization and content. You read the following sentence you wrote and you are not sure about it: "In first part I discuss the Einstein's theory."
1) Is it "in first part" or "in a first part" or "in the first part"?
2) Is it "I discuss" or "I will discuss"?
3) Is it "the Einstein's theory" or "Einstein's theory"?
Let's see if Google can help for (1). When I put in the three options, here's what I got (all the searches here are on March 27, 2005):
"in first part" - 10,200
"in a first part" - 10,800
"in the first part" - 602,000
All of them are prevalent, but by numbers alone "in the first part" is by far the most common. Of course you would need to check several of the actual example sites to see if the use seemed to be the same as yours. Try this yourself now: Google. Remember what you learned from the Google Basics part: put the phrase in double quotes (" ") and click on the cached version of any site you want to look at.
Let's try (2). Your question here is whether you have to use the future "will" or not. You could just try "I discuss" (and get 439,000 hits) and "I will discuss" (413,000 hits). It's hard to tell though whether all (or even a substantial number) of those uses are the same as yours.
You can be more precise here and try the whole phrase "In the first part I discuss" (112 hits) and "in the first part I will discuss" (96 hits). Based on this second search, you get clearer results. Both forms are used, but "in the first part I discuss" is slightly more popular, just as in the case of "I discuss" over "I will discuss".
Now let's try (3): "the Einstein's theory" gets 324 hits; "Einstein's theory" gets 141,000. Besides giving you the answer pretty clearly here, this should make you stop and think--what might the rule or pattern be that would account for this? We won't cover it here, but you might think of some similar phrases.
What to Look for
I picked what to look for in the examples above, but what can you do with your own papers?