The Substantial Usages of Monolingual Dictionary in Writing

Name                 : Bella Charista Salampessy

No.Reg        : 20160111024031

Date                : Monday, March 11, 2019

THE SUBSTANTIAL USAGES OF MONOLINGUAL DICTIONARY IN WRITING

Dictionaries are resources for finding word meanings, parts of speech, word origins and even synonyms and antonyms. When reading or writing an article or essay, deciphering profound words, phrases or sentences, using a dictionary could be great help. Primarily, its purpose is to give meanings to words. Dictionaries are divided into two which are monolingual dictionary (it is written only in English) and bilingual dictionary (translating the target language). Both of them have their own special usages among the English students in every subject especially in writing subject. According to the writer’s perspective, monolingual dictionary is better than bilingual dictionary for making the students to be more confident to do all things in English. Hence, this kind of dictionary is better to be applied for advanced level. Moreover, there are three things why monolingual dictionary is substantial in writing.

For the first thing, extending the schemata or vocabularies. In writing, the students or people need to know more about new words. Sometimes, common words become a kind of boredom in case of writing style which is the way people write their essay. Therefore, they need to find and exchange the common word with their synonym in dictionary. This activity generates the schemata become wider than ever. For example, a student wants to use the word “do” and she or he finds out the synonym in dictionary then exchange it to be “act”.

        Second, correcting the spelling. Another problem the students may have is when they need to check their spelling but they could not recognize the word which they are looking for.  So, monolingual dictionary is the best option for finding the valid words when writing an essay. For example, If people need to write the word “letter” and they are not sure of the few letters with single l or double l, try some other possibilities They can look out for the correct spelling in the monolingual dictionary.

        For the most important thing, realizing the usage of locution. To be a good dictionary user, it is not only enough to know what to use the dictionary for, but also to recognize the word classes or part of speech. It could be informed which part of speech a certain word belongs. Should “flower” be a verb, a noun, an adjective or a combination of these three?  One more thing, it could also be a guide to choose a particular locution use. People or the students could search in the word classes in their monolingual dictionary. For example, part of speech of the word “flower” in the sentence “The flower is beautiful” is a noun.