Idea Is Queen!

My knowledge of English writing comes from textbooks. Sadly most of these books are written by Chinese authors. So I totally understand I’m writing English mixed with Chinese flavor. Gosh, I only know how to write simple+formal English (with frequent grammar errors). Every now and then, I have to check common usage of words/phrases on Google. My approach is entering a fragment of a sentence in question as search key words, and checking the results on the first page and supplemented with total numbers of returned items. If there is at least one sentence containing exactly the same phrase as I wrote, I will consider it a right usage.

It would be nice if there is an extension of FireFox or a plug-in of online word processors that helps non-Eng natives check usages. For example, I copy/past a phrase or part of a sentence on a box and the program compares my input with sentences available on the Internet. Within seconds, return a “correct use” to me if it finds a number of fragments (or sentences) overlapping mine. Otherwise returns recommendations of usages to me. Recommendations are based on a range of similarity of comparison.

I know FireFox has various versions of extensions developed to check spelling. And nearly all online word processors like the one I’m using now have included it as a basic function. MS Word can also check grammar errors. But I would like one widget that focuses on checking “common usage” as well as offers me recommendations by leveraging Internet as a huge database/writing sample.

This idea is certainly useless to native English writers, but helpful to many others. Is there any app already doing what I describe above?

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