Reference Materials

Read BFLAN Chapter 8 (p.112)

Topics

Lesson, Readings, and Examples

Dictionary and Thesaurus

A dictionary tells you what a word means, and a thesaurus tells you what other words you can use in place of a word. When you're writing, you'll frequently be searching for just the right word to convey not only a direct meaning, but also a subtext and implication that all align with the idea you're trying to express. Using the thesaurus to explore similar words is a good way to solve this problem.

A dictionary is more useful when reading, so that you can look up unfamiliar words and understand what's being said. However, it's also good to occasionally look up a word you've been using, just to be sure you're using it well and taking full advantage of it's complete meaning.

On the sorting of words

The only actual "skill" involved in using these reference works is understanding how words are sorted so that you can look them up easily. It's very simple:

  1. Start at the first letter in both words.
  2. Compare the current letters. If they're different, the word with the letter that comes earlier in the alphabet is sorted ahead of the other word and you're done.
  3. If they're the same, move to the next letter and repeat step two.
  4. If one word runs out of letters first, it comes before the word that has letters remaining.

Writing citations

When you're writing non-fiction work, you need to be in the habit of giving credit to your sources and leaving your readers with a trail of breadcrumbs that they can use to investigate further into what you wrote. This is done by providing citations - brief blobs of information that list all of the details a reader would need about a source in order to find it and review it. There are three main formats people use for citations:

We're going to practice each of them over the course of the next few months.

Youtube videos about writing citations

These are quick tutorial videos about how to write citations in various styles. You might want to bookmark this page, or each of these, for future reference.

Homework