Reference Links - Word Manipulation
Vocabulary and Definition
My concept of writing is that it is painting pictures with words. If you use the correct words and in the right balance you are capable of creating art. If you overdo it, all you do is create mud. Ask a painter what happens when you use all the colours indiscriminately. The end result is a muddy brown.
The following are my primary reference links for ensuring that I have chosen words that paint the image in the reader's mind in a way that is usually simple and very understandable. I resist using larger words and, for that matter, shortforms. Text messaging is one of the worst methods of communication ever developed by mankind. It's writing for the incredibly lazy, as I see it.
Dictionary
Dictionary.com has the added feature of sound files that will pronounce the word for you. Sometimes I just cut and paste the entire entry into my copy and also immediately write a source statement with link directly under the defintion.
Thesaurus
Thesaurus.com is a sister site to dictionary.com. I use it because it has more entries than you get in Word. Most of the time, I will test Word's limited list and then go to this site for a better word that conveys the proper feel in the story.
Translation
I use Google Translate more to help me with understanding short phrases or single words in foreign languages or to give me a possible replacement word in another language along with the correct font or accented font.
It's translation capabilites are still a work in progress but it is a move in the right direction. I look at it as the universal translator (the one they talk about in all the Star Trek series) still wearing diapers.
Here is also another form of translation that may be useful when talking to today's younger crowd because they will speak in words that are their own, it seems. Slangsite.com
