I’ll let you in on a little secret: Even the best editors rely on tried-and-true tools to check our work, better our craft, and ensure perfection for our clients.

In this blog post, I discuss four of my favorite online editing resources that I’ve found over the years editing. I’ll be the first to admit it—I use these with almost every project I work on.

(I also want to note that I have not been compensated for any of these recommendations, and this is not an advertisement. These are my honest and true favorites!)

Without further ado, here are four must-saves for your Bookmarks bar (and one honorable mention):

Power Thesaurus

Believe it or not, aside from the usual grammar corrections, a non-negligible part of my editing process involves optimizing word choice, that is, seeing if I can find any places where I could substitute stronger or more precise vocabulary. This means that I’ve been around the block when it comes to thesauruses and similar resources.

So believe me when I tell you to forget thesaurus.com and the skimpy Synonyms feature in MS Word—Power Thesaurus is the heavy hitter you’re looking for when you need to find the perfect word. I would even go so far as to say (sorry fellow language lovers) that I’ve found Power Thesaurus to be infinitely more helpful than a dictionary.

When you search a term, Power Thesaurus populates lists of not only synonyms but also antonyms, definitions, and example sentences.

For synonyms specifically, it provides lists of similar words, phrases, and idioms, and it even creates lists of similar words in different parts of speech, e.g., nouns, adjectives, and verbs (a function a dictionary could only dream of).

Also, when you click on any synonym populated by your search, Power Thesaurus shows you not only the definition of that word but also ‘mutual’ and ‘unique’ synonyms, as shown below.

And the cherry on top: Power Thesaurus is free, and its free version populates all top-rated search results (which is more than enough to get you started).

It also offers a PRO version, which I use and love, which provides even more search results and other customization perks.

If your head is spinning with all this functionality, try it out yourself—you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Purdue OWL Writing Lab

I’m originally from Indiana, the home of Purdue University, which operates the Purdue OWL (Online Writing Lab). Growing up, the pride we Hoosiers have for this world-renowned resource was obvious—because it was mentioned in every English-related class I took through the end of high school.  

And truly, the Purdue OWL deserves the praise and attention it gets. It has a stunning amount of information on any and every topic in English grammar, writing, citation, and beyond. It also has specific resources for areas such as subject-specific writing, job search writing, and even multilingual/ESL English resources.

I could try to list all the resources and topics covered on the Purdue OWL website, but it would honestly eat the rest of this blog post.

Some lesser-known highlights among the Purdue OWL resources are as follows:

• Personal Correspondence – Resources for writing personal letters and newsletters.

• Designing an Effective PowerPoint Presentation – Fittingly, presented using PowerPoints.

• Résumés and CVs – From page design to tailoring your résumé for a specific employer.

• Resources for ESL Students – I can’t recommend these resources enough for my ESL/international writers!

• Writing for a North American Business Audience – See also its sister pages, Writing for Global Business Audiences, Writing for a Chinese Business Audience, and Writing for an Indian Business Audience

Personally, I use the Purdue OWL primarily as a quick reference to double-check that I am accurately applying style guides, as it offers resources and concise summaries of central points of major style guides, including APA (6th and 7th eds.), MLA, Chicago, and AMA.

Google NGram

You can’t imagine how many hours I’ve spent sitting in front of a single phrase wondering, “What is the best way to write this out of Options A, B, and C?” (This often comes down to prepositions—a common nemesis of writers and editors everywhere.)

Here is where NGram is a lifesaver: When you enter words or phrases into its search function, NGram displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books over the selected years. This is super useful for seeing which phrases are more common or frequently used.

An example I came across the other day: a paper I was editing interchangeably used the words “purchase intention” and “purchase intentions” to describe the same concept. As I wasn’t sure which was more correct/common to use, I ran a quick NGram search, which showed me the following:

Easy! So I chose “purchase intention” and used it throughout the paper.

NGram has also has about 100 other super useful functionalities. I won’t list them here, but for a comprehensive guide, see Google’s About Ngram Viewer page and be astounded.

However, there is perhaps an obvious disclaimer: Ngram only shows you which words/phrases are more commonly used, not necessarily which iteration is grammatically correct. To check grammatical correctness, it is probably better to run a separate search. Or hire an editor ;)

COCA

The Corpus of Contemporary American English, or COCA, is another one of those massive resources that even I have barely scratched the surface of in terms of its functionality and usefulness. In a word, the COCA is a comprehensive corpus of over a billion words from 1990–2020 that you can use for searching language patterns in words and phrases.

I recognize that this is a pretty vague description—that’s just because the range of COCA’s usefulness is hard to summarize. So instead, I’ll show you a few examples of how I use it.

(Or, for a more in-depth description of the COCA’s functionalities that’s full of helpful explanations and examples, Ingrid Veloso’s COCA Tutorial Page is the best resource I’ve come across so far in terms of an easy explanation. The COCA website also has help files that are arranged by functionality.)

Without further ado, the beauty and the mystery of the COCA:

First, the “List” function of the Search allows you to search individual words and phrases to see their frequency in the corpus and different examples of their usage.

The main way that I use this List search, though, is with the wildcard function, which lets you search for strings that include your search term.

What does that mean? I’ll show you:

Let’s say there is a word I’m looking for but I can’t remember it. I know it starts with “im” but that’s all I can think of.

So, I could type in “im*” (with the asterisk indicating the wildcard search). and the COCA will give me a list of words that start with “im” arranged in the order of their frequency in the corpus.

Then, the COCA will give me a list of words that start with “im” arranged in the order of their frequency in the corpus.

Now let’s say the word on the tip of my tongue isn’t in that search, but I know it’s an adjective. There’s a handy dropdown list to the right of the Search function called “POS” (‘part of speech’) that I can scroll in and choose the correct part of speech that I’m looking for.

Because I’m looking for an adjective, I’ll scroll down to “adj.ALL,” which will then be added to my search.

And here are my search results!

As another example, let’s say I want to see what kinds of words usually come after the word “digital.” I would type “digital” in the Search and then add an asterisk (*) indicating the wildcard function.

And my results would look like this:

You can also use the Word function of the Search, which lets you see the COCA’s data on one particular word, including frequent topics that are related to the word, words that are often used with your searched word (called ‘collocates’), synonyms and related words, and lines of text data that include the word in context. It’s like the dictionary on six shots of espresso.

For example, the other day, I was considering using the word “spotlighting” but was unsure whether it would fit in the context of the sentence. So, I went to the Word search in the COCA, searched “spotlighting,” and scrolled down to the “Concordance Lines” results, which showed me similar recent phrases/contexts where this word has been used as follows:

I realized from this search that this word seems to frequently have more positive connotations (i.e., it is generally used in a positive sense, as in the example, “The bloggers will be spotlighting some of our favorite authors”), which was a bit less optimal for my sentence, so I decided not to use it. Thanks COCA!

Two downsides of the COCA: First, it often makes you log in between each search you take, which doesn’t take long but does cost an unnecessary few extra clicks. That’s a small price to pay for the immensity of the resource it provides, but it’s still not optimal.

Second, the corpus only spans until 2020, which makes it less useful if you are looking for more recent trends in the English language. For example, it will likely be less useful in areas such as, e.g., AI, deep learning/algorithms, and COVID-19-related material.

Honorable Mention:

Google’s AI Function

Hear me out on this one. I’m generally anti-AI in academic writing for a number of reasons I won’t go into here, one of them being its immense resource usage. However, there is no denying that AI can be a useful tool if used intentionally and diligently (and, I would recommend, sparingly).

The one function for which I will occasionally use Google’s AI search results is generating similar/alternative phrasings to use.

Specifically, when Power Thesaurus and the COCA aren’t giving me the best options, I may go to Google’s search function and type “another way to say [insert phrase I want to substitute].” For example, the other day, I typed in “another way to say take a step further”:

After considering the context of the sentence and the paper overall, I ended up picking “progress.” Easy!

So there you have it! These resources are unimaginably helpful to me on an everyday basis, and I hope that my humble summaries here make you feel comfortable enough to give them a try for your next writing or editing project.

But these are not the only resources I use! I’ve got an arsenal that I’ll continue to reveal to you in further blog posts. Keep an eye on this space (i.e., my blog) for future posts on other helpful resources I’ve found in my years editing. Thanks for reading!