I recently saw a question on the [#blog/phdchat channel]1 that made me dig a bit deeper into the MS Word Spelling & Grammar checker options.
@solomon_kazza @KristinG63 Oh! Sentences >60 words can be marked in word by spelling & grammar per https://t.co/MPLDQYW8CW phdchat writing
— Simon Knight (@sjgknight) November 29, 2015
It turns out there are a bunch of options hidden away, of course some of
these [need ‘taming’]2, or [turning off]3, but many are
useful, and knowing where they are/how to use them is useful. I’ve also
seen a number of grammar and style checkers, often as word addons,
recently and am interested that many share most functionality with the
MS Word features, with presentational tweaks (more on this soon). To
find these features in Word, go to the main file menu and click
‘options’, then: 1. Select
proofing: 2. Go to spelling and grammar
options:
3. Select ‘grammar and style’ and click settings
for a long list of
options:
There are lots of options to play
with here (plus, adding words to the dictionary, etc. to ensure you’re
not getting lots of distracting false negatives is probably sensible). I
suspect lots of people ignore most of the inbuilt checking, so thinking
about alternative modes of presentation would be interesting. One way to
do that is through addins (see [e.g.s]4) or macros (see below).
Knowing when to make use of which features (and when and how to turn off
distracting features) is key here. One of the inbuilt functions in MS
Word is spotting long sentences (>60 words). However, it might also
be useful to identify a lower threshold, or to identify particularly
short sentences. For that purpose (and various others), you can also
write macros for Word. So, for the sentence length issue (with thanks to
[here]5 and [here]6):
Sub Mark_Long()
Dim iMyCount As Integer
Dim iWords As Integer
If Not ActiveDocument.Saved Then
ActiveDocument.Save
End If
'Reset counter
iMyCount = 0
'Set number of words
iWords = 35 ' <==== change as required
For Each MySent In ActiveDocument.Sentences
If MySent.Words.Count > iWords Then ' <==== play with to look at sentences of varying length
MySent.Font.Color = wdColorRed
iMyCount = iMyCount + 1
End If
Next
MsgBox iMyCount & " sentences longer than " & _
iWords & " words."
End Sub
This can be added to Word by: 1. Going to the ‘view’ tab and selected
‘macros’ on the right (make sure to click on it, and not the down arrow
to view more
options) 2. Typing a new macro name (e.g.
‘LongSen’, or ‘test’ here), and clicking
‘create’
3. Pasting the code into the space
between the ‘sub LongSen ()’ and ‘End Sub’ 4. You can ‘run’ the code
from the macro list, or you can add it as a button to one of your menus
by: 1. Going into file options, and clicking either ‘Customize Ribbon’
or ‘Quick Access Toolbar’ 2. Selecting ‘Macros’ in the drop down menu to
choose commands, and adding the macro you’ve selected to the menu of
your
choice
Photo by
volkspider
Footnotes
-
http://www.subversivecopyeditor.com/blog/2010/10/taming-ms-words-infuriating-features.html ↩
-
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/microsoft-office/10-annoying-word-features-and-how-to-turn-them-off/ ↩
-
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1uG3GmMu3VDyAYXI2_IcBnU0gpZ2xFqMGZFq2msbYvd0/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000#slide=id.gd58fd3200_0_71 ↩
-
http://wordribbon.tips.net/T011909_Finding_Long_Sentences.html ↩
-
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:FZ0wqn13LhIJ:answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2007-word/sentences-length-indicators/941b7508-8e34-4070-a7c6-bb27d1fbab88%3Fdb%3D5+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au ↩