Generally speaking, usage is “the way in which a word or phrase is normally and correctly used.”
For example, in American English, ‘decision’ is commonly used in the form ‘make a decision’
whereas in British English, ‘take a decision’ is more common usage.
Usage is a constantly changing phenomenon.
Learn to use google’s Ngram Viewer, link below…
Word questions
Ask The Word Lady
or subscribe to her newsletter. Warning: Canadian English may appear, eh.
USAGE and word choice
University of Victoria (great campus!) usage guide
http://www.ltn.lv/~markir/writersguide/Pages/DictionUsageToc.html
Cohesion devices: logical connectors a.k.a. signposts a.k.a. connectives,
http://sana.aalto.fi/awe/cohesion/signposts/index.html
BTW: explore this site – it contains good things but the navigation doesn’t tell you much.
USAGE and style guides
Garner’s Modern English Usage introduced here
The Economist style guide for seven pounds is indispensable for GRIPS students.
The Economist magazine also has a free style guide; although it is simple, it is solid.
http://www.economist.com/styleguide/introduction
The Asian Development Bank Institute has its own style guide and style notes:
https://www.adb.org/adbi/publications/tools
Grammar Girl web site and podcasts (despite the name, a serious contemporary usage resource)
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/
MIT’s ComDor Editorial Style Guide
http://web.mit.edu/comdor/editguide/
Writing Technical Articles
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/etc/writing-style.html
Technical Writing
http://www.rbs0.com/tw.htm
Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style online
http://www.bartleby.com/141/
The Coventry University Harvard Reference Style is here
Journalistic style: the 4-box system
http://www.mcgillreport.org/largemouth.htm#anchor4
Google ngrams: a pretty cool tool:
https://books.google.com/ngrams
USAGE: Concordance
1. Fantastic! Three great concordance samplers which can access the biggest and most famous corpuses (including the British National Corpus) are:
Lextutor
http://www.lextutor.ca/conc/eng/
Brigham Young University’s concordancer
http://corpus.byu.edu/
Sketch Engine has access to a number of corpuses (corpi)
https://app.sketchengine.eu/#open
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Perhaps usefully, the British Academic Written English Corpus is a record of proficient university-level student writing at the turn of the 21st century
http://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/research-directories/current-projects/2015/british-academic-written-english-corpus-bawe/
2. Make your own concordance! Laurence Antony at Waseda University made Antconc, a free software for making your own concordance.
http://www.laurenceanthony.net/software.html
3. Google can be a simple concordancer too:
http://www.johntedesco.net/blog/2012/06/21/how-to-solve-impossible-problems-daniel-russells-awesome-google-search-techniques/
Lawrie Hunter 