If you are a virtual assistant, undoubtedly you will eventually have a client that wishes you to rewrite something he or she may have penned or typed. It's not always an easy task to find just the right words to capture the essence of what is being said in an interesting and accurate manner. Now is the time to make your articles rich in content by using a thesaurus.

What is it you might ask? A thesaurus is just the tool you need; it's a book that has a classified list of synonyms. You remember what a synonym is from your days in English class at school, right? According to the Encarta English Dictionary (provided in Microsoft Word 2007), a synonym is a word that means the same, or almost the same, as another word in the same language, either in all of its uses or in a specific context. Examples of synonyms in this sense are "environment" and "surroundings" and the verbs "tear" and "rip".

So why is a thesaurus useful in making your content rich when you write or rewrite articles? For one thing, if you replace words with synonyms, your content might just grab and keep the reader's interest that much longer. You've all heard that you only have thirty seconds to stimulate a reader's natural curiosity so they dive deeper into your article.

What are some good thesaurus's out there that I can use online? I will discuss three here. Don't take my word as gospel, however; do a search in your favorite search engine under "thesaurus". I want you to have the freedom to make up your own mind as to which one will work the best for you.

Unless I'm working on a laptop, the very first thesaurus that I use all the time is WordWeb. WordWeb is a free English thesaurus and dictionary software download for Windows. Why do I like it? Just check out some of the things it can help you with:

* Definitions and synonyms

* Proper nouns

* Related words

* Pronunciations

* 150 000 root words

* 120 000 synonym sets

* Looks up words in almost any program

What makes Word Web so useful is that you have the ability to use a combination of the Ctrl + Alt + the W keys on your computer keyboard to have the program open on your desktop. This saves immeasurable time and is even faster than the next program I am going to talk about.

Remember I mentioned that I work on a laptop? One of the disadvantages of doing so is that a laptop will not have as much memory as a desktop so I do not tend to download a lot of software. What I have discovered is that Microsoft Office Word 2007 has a built-in thesaurus. How do you kick it into gear? To give you a simple explanation, say I want to change the word gear in my previous sentence to something else. I would place my cursor on the word "gear", right click on the word, and scroll down to Synonyms. Voila, you'll have a list of synonyms that you can pick and chose from listed on the right for you.

You can also do the same type of search, only this time right click on the word "gear", scroll down to Look Up, and left click with your mouse. It will automatically default to All Reference Books, but that is easy to change. Just click on the down arrow next to All Reference Books and change it to Thesaurus: English (You can also choose French or Spanish.

One more method I have utilized in the past is using Merriam-Webster OnLine. Besides having a comprehensive thesaurus, they also have three other reference tools: English-Spanish, Dictionary, and Medical, as well as providing you with the "Word of the Day" .

A virtual assistant has to be thrifty in their use of time, as well as being the best of the best. Oftentimes, there will be resources available to us that we don't even know that can save us an immense amount of work. One of those resources is a good thesaurus.

A good thesaurus can not only save us time, it can provide us with synonyms that will help us write and rewrite articles, blogs, press releases, eBooks, etc., that are award-winning. Not only that, a thesaurus can help us make our material rich in content.

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