My question is about ways to find out about, or remind oneself of, related concepts. Say I'm writing an article and I'm stuck finding the right expression.
- I want to say that the author is confused about a concept, but I don't want to use the word "confused", for stylistic, syntactical or any other reasons. I would like to find other words like "muddle", "is not clear about", or "does not distinguish".
- I want to say that I reject an objection to a given view. I would like to find other expressions like "riposte", "rejoinder", but also sentence templates such as "Contra N.N., I hold that"
- What are different ways to express the concept opposition? "In contrast", "Whereas .., ...", "On the other hand".
- What are different ways to make an enumeration of arguments? "First, ...; Second, ...", "For one thing, ...", "for another", ....
What I'm looking for is similar to a thesaurus, but many of these reference works (such as this one) only list expressions of roughly the same lexical category: "contrast" -- "comparison", but not "despite the similarities, ..." etc. "By contrast" is not even listed. Often what you need is just to be pointed in the right direction. Is there anything - a dictionary, thesaurus, list of schematic sentences, web site, ... - that fits my description?
