LANGUAGE CENTER - STANFORD UNIVERSITY

As a Tool for Academic Writing

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Introduction

Welcome. This site is the result of several years' experience using Google with my advanced graduate writing class  (EFSLANG 698B) at Stanford University. In working through responses to the language in student papers, often of a highly specialized nature, I have found Google's corpus of over 8 billion webpages invaluable for determining conventional language forms both in general academic English and in the genres of particular fields. By "conventional language forms" I mean not only what reference books would consider "correct" grammar and "appropriate" lexis but also the many other uses that dictionaries and grammar books cannot readily if at all provide usage information about.

If you are reading this, I assume you have been through the Google Basics section of the site already. If not, it would be a good idea to go there now and make sure you know how to use Google for the purposes we'll discuss here....go ahead, I can wait. Google Basics

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OK, let's begin. Here is an opening example, based on a real problem I encountered. A student writes the phrase "bigger variance" in a paper that involves statistics. My native speaker intuition (as an academic) is that "larger variance" is preferable--it feels like the right academic collocation. I don't think a dictionary is going to help me here, so I could 1) not say anything to the student (after all, it's "grammatical" and doesn't distort the meaning--maybe it is acceptable), 2) make the change (or note it as an "error") and tell the student "we say 'larger', not 'bigger' with 'variance'," or 3) look for independent support. The last option could be handled with a concordancing program and a good-sized corpus, or I can try a search engine like Google. Naturally, I choose Google.

I run the search on Google (March 21, 2005 at 9:32 PM Pacific Time) and in a few seconds I find the following: "bigger variance" 341 hits; "larger variance" 16,900 hits. I type 16900/341 into Google and get 16 900 / 341 = 49.5601173 as my result (Google is a calculator too). I make a note to the student that my answer is more prevalent than his "in the wild" by a factor of 50 to 1. When you get numbers like this (especially when backing up your intuition), the question is no longer "Is 'bigger variance' right?" The question is "Maybe both are right, but do you just want to be right or do you want to be conventional?" 

Of course there's more to it than raw numbers. "Variance" can have different meanings, and for some of those meanings, maybe "bigger" works better than for others. A quick glance at the first page of hits for "larger variance" in this case though shows that the intended meaning (with numbers) shows up a lot. So in this case I would tell the student "bigger variance" might be acceptable but "larger variance".

The rest of this Google for teachers section is divided into three parts:

1. Google in Responding
discusses using Google when you're on your own reading student papers to help you understand unfamiliar words and phrases (if that's an issue) and more importantly make judgments as to the correctness, acceptability, or conventionality of forms the student may use.
2. Google in Writing Tutorials explains how to use some of the same techniques in individual writing conferences.
3. Google in Writing Classes presents some suggestions for introducing Google to students for this purpose and using it to discuss language issues in writing with the whole class.

In learning to harness some of the power of Google for these purposes, you may discover that not only does it assist you in those areas, but that as a bonus your ability to use Google to search for information is significantly enhanced.