Make use of collocation

Posted by Giang Son | Feb 01, 2024 | 2 min read

An short but effective tip for improving your writing.


Writing in a foreign language (say, a Vietnamese writing in English) can be notoriously difficult (trust me, I've been doing it for nearly a decade now). One of the most challengine aspects, is to construct sentences so that they sound relatively natural to a native speaker. At a beginner's level, we (or at least, I) have a tendency to translate an expression word-by-word and, thereby inadvertently invent some new expressions that, while still understandable, sound rather unnatural.

Back in high school, I learnt a trick to tackle this problem: it's called collocation.

So what's is collocation? 

Apparently, certain combinations of English words sound natural because they are frequently used together and are widely accepted as "correct", as opposed to some other combinations that never go together and thus sound strange. These right combinations are called "collocations".

Here's an example: "pay attention to" (in Vietnamse: "dành sự chú ý") vs "save attention" (when translated word-by-word, also means "dành sự chú ý")

So how am I supposed to know all these collocations? 

We you look it up in little website that lets you search for collocations for a certain words: https://www.freecollocation.com/ (it's basically a dictionary of collocations). Say you way to find which word goes with "sentence", just type "sentence" in there and the website will show you all the words that can be used in conjunction with it.

A nice by-product of this is that you'd discover many academic-sounding expressions that can be useful if you're writing, well, academically. 

Hope you've found this helpful. I certainly did, just look at all the collocations I've highlighted in bold. 


Thank you for reading. I've also written some other posts that you can check out.