STUDENT: Hey, I'm having a bit of a tough time.
LEARNING COACH: What's the problem?
STUDENT: There are word choice comments all over this essay.
LEARNING COACH: Why do you think that is?
STUDENT: I don’t know. I didn’t want to keep using the same words over and over so I looked in the thesaurus. That’s what you use to find synonyms for words.
LEARNING COACH: That’s true. Variety of words is important but you also need to understand the connotation of the word.
STUDENT: What’s that?
LEARNING COACH: What the word means in context.
STUDENT: So, I searched for the word walk and I got a lot of different words, amble, mosey, saunter, strut.
LEARNING COACH: And if you want to describe someone as walking confidently, which of those would you use?
STUDENT: Saunter? Or maybe strut?
LEARNING COACH: Those are good words. Would you use amble?
STUDENT: I don’t really know what that means.
LEARNING COACH: Okay, so this is when you would look amble up in the dictionary to see what kind of walking it describes.
STUDENT: So, the purpose of the thesaurus is to help me use a lot of different words. And, the purpose of the dictionary is to make sure I use the right word!
LEARNING COACH: Yes! Now, saunter on over to your computer and fix up that essay!
STUDENT: Righto!
Main idea of this?