How Can Search Engines Improve Your Writing?

Abstract

The basis of the study reported in this article sprang from the assumption that incorporating the use of web search engines such as Google or Yahoo into English as a second language (ESL) writing may be useful for learners in identifying grammatical errors in their texts. The study has measured the effectiveness on reducing the number of grammatical errors by way of a simple method which divides long sentences into smaller word blocks and searches them within quotation marks on the Internet. The results suggest that using the quotation marks search method enables beginning ESL writers to notice and improve grammatical mistakes or unnatural expressions easily by checking the number of results each search query generates and choosing the word block with the highest number.