In the last module we use the British National Corpus.
Now, a lot of students Google Affrays to see if it's correct.
The trouble with that is that there is a lot of incorrect
English on the World Wide Web.
Here's a better way of using the World Wide Web.
Go to web core at this address.
Click on advanced options.
Insert the phrase you are interested in into the
search box.
And then Scroll down and select one concordance line
per website.
This avoids too much repetition.
Then scroll further down to add
popular sites. And click on UK broadsheet newspapers.
That means the quality British newspapers like the
Times, the Telegraph.
Then Scroll down to the bottom.
And click on search.
When you get the results, you can then click on them and see
the actual newspaper articles.
Where that phrase was used?
The domain UK broadsheet newspapers is huge.
But you can of course had other domains too.
Other good domains for this purpose are tabloid newspapers,
the BBC. British academic and Wikipedia.
If you're writing in American
English. You will probably prefer US newspapers.
US academic and Wikipedia.
Because they're published
writing. The quality is high enough too.
In short, Web core enables you to use portions of the World
Wide Web. As a vast vast corpus.
The advantage of webcor for our
purpose. Is that it gives you access to much more English?
The British national corpus.
Sometimes you need that.
Especially for longer or more unusual phrases.
For example, you may have
written the phrase. She misses you a lot.
And you want to be sure that it is correct.
That phrase does not occur in the British National Corpus.
But it does occur in webcore.
In a reliable source, the Los Angeles Times.
So that you can be confident it is correct English.
The disadvantage with Webcore is that there is so much language
that even when you carefully
selected domains. There may be
some incorrect English. For example, an author may be
imitating the speech of someone who is not a good
speaker of English.
In fact, this problem occurs with all very large corpora. So
just because a phrase appears there doesn't mean it is
necessarily correct English.
Ideally. You need to see it used by at least two or three
writers. In just the way you want to use it.
So. My advice is to use the British National Corpus first.
That contains 100 million words, which is often plenty.
It's a phrase you want to use doesn't occur in the
British National Corpus.
But you still think it is correct. Then you may want more.
And then you can go to webcore.
And use the UK broadsheet newspapers, say.
And then add other domains one by one. If you need to.
Try it out. You'll soon get to that. You'll soon get a
feel for its potential.
Now I want you to practice using Webcore.
Look at a piece of your writing and choose some phrases which
are three words long.
And some which are 4 words long.
Then see if you can find them being used in the way you have
used them. On webcor