My secret weapon for writing English prose is the "Kenkyusha Dictionary of English Collocations". A collocation dictionary gives you words that commonly go tog

My secret weapon for writing English prose is the "Kenkyusha Dictionary of English Collocations". A collocation dictionary gives you words that commonly go together with another word. In particular, you find the right verb to go with a given noun, or descriptive adjectives to further chacterize that noun. It's helpful for brainstorming. It also helps a lot (but not only!) if English is not your first language. In my view, a collocations dictionary is more useful than a thesaurus. The Kenkyusha dictionary includes Japanese translations (unreadable to me), but the collocations are given in English. It's very comprehensive, more so than any other list of collocations I've seen. It's hard to find as a book, but a digital edition can be found on a well-known Swedish sharing platform.