As a non-native English speaker, writing academic papers in English can be sometimes challenging. For example, you may not find the appropriate english word that fits to the context. Your writing may sound halting or unnatural because you don’t know phrases and idioms. Here are some websites that I find useful in those situations.
Words
- Vocabulary.com: An English-English dictionary. The beautiful typography and clean design makes it even fun to search words. Since it’s intended mainly for educational purposes, it’s equipped with a feature to help you learn words. The downside is the relatively small number of vocabulary.
- Thesaurus.com: A thesaurus. What I like about this web service is that allows you to sort and filter synonyms based on its complexity, length and relevance.
- Weblio: A Japanese-English dictionary. As far as I know, the volume of available vocabulary is incomparable to other online dictionaries.
- Thsrs: Helps you find shorter synonyms.
Phrases
- Academic Phrasebank: A collection of frequently used phrases in academic papers. Phrases are organized by its purposes so that you can quickly find the phrase you are looking for. There is also a significantly enhanced version of the phrase bank available as an ebook for 5.50GBP.
- SpringerExemplar: A search engine for academic phrases and sentences. Since it shows you the results from the journals published by Springer, you can understand how phrases are actually used in published papers.