A question or two about writing...

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acorngalaxy
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A question or two about writing...

Postby acorngalaxy » Mon Oct 25, 2021 1:27 pm

1) When writing, do you use a dictionary and/or other similar resources? (eg. translator, Reverso). Why or why not?

2) This happens to me all the time, I'm not sure if this applies to you. I send my corrections to around 3-4 natives for corrections, and the text always comes back corrected in different ways (eg. within a sentence, some people can say the word was wrongly used, others say that AND the grammatical construction is wrong, some only say that it's grammatically incorrect, while some are ok with how it's written (i.e. they do not mark that certain chunk as erroneous) ). In this case, who should I trust?
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AllSubNoDub
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Re: A question or two about writing...

Postby AllSubNoDub » Mon Oct 25, 2021 1:50 pm

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Last edited by AllSubNoDub on Mon Oct 25, 2021 4:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Herodotean
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Re: A question or two about writing...

Postby Herodotean » Mon Oct 25, 2021 3:37 pm

acorngalaxy wrote:1) When writing, do you use a dictionary and/or other similar resources? (eg. translator, Reverso). Why or why not?

I usually use dictionaries when I write, sometimes to look up a word in the L2 that I don't know or can't remember, sometimes to check that I'm using a construction or collocation correctly. I could probably benefit from spending more time writing without consulting a dictionary.
acorngalaxy wrote:2) This happens to me all the time, I'm not sure if this applies to you. I send my corrections to around 3-4 natives for corrections, and the text always comes back corrected in different ways (eg. within a sentence, some people can say the word was wrongly used, others say that AND the grammatical construction is wrong, some only say that it's grammatically incorrect, while some are ok with how it's written (i.e. they do not mark that certain chunk as erroneous) ). In this case, who should I trust?

If an English learner writes "I was in hospital for two days," an American unfamiliar with British English might mark it wrong, expecting the article before "hospital." Are these native speakers from different regions or countries? And are they linguistically aware, able to distinguish between different standards and registers of language use? You might be using colloquial expressions that are usually acceptable in everyday speech but that some native speakers consider incorrect.
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Re: A question or two about writing...

Postby Iversen » Mon Oct 25, 2021 5:46 pm

I do use dictionaries (and my own grammar sheets and grammars and occasionally also sources on the internet like Wikipedia and Verbix) , but I don't send my writings around for evaluation. However the central question here sems to be whether you can expect native speakers to agree on corrections, and we can see even in this forum that they don't always agree. And for that reason I am obstinate enough just to write as best I can and hope that my message be understood. And I think I showed this attitude in the way I formulated it ...
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