Grammar checking: troubled waters but big improvements for Word’s spellcheck. While it might not be seen strictly as a feature of spellcheck, Word’s grammar checker is bundled with spellcheck. And while editors have been mocking Word’s bad suggestions for decades, it has made some improvements. … [Read more...]
Make the Most of Spellcheck, Part 5
Troubleshooting is our topic now. Because sometimes, spellcheck isn’t getting it right. The problem is usually that spell checking has been turned off, either generally or for that specific text. Here are three things to check. Styles Problem number one is styles. Styles are used to style the text … [Read more...]
Make the Most of Spellcheck, Part 4
We continue our look at custom dictionaries. by exploring a sort of “anti-dictionary:” the exclude dictionary. Exclude Dictionaries Another sort of custom dictionary is the “exclude” dictionary. As you might infer from the name, this is a list of words you want excluded from spellcheck’s … [Read more...]
Make the Most of Spellcheck, Part 3
This time, we’re going to look at customizing the dictionaries used by spellcheck to get the most out of this automated support for what editors do. You know spellcheck, and in the previous post you learned about running and rerunning spellcheck as well as what readability statistics are about. In … [Read more...]
Make the Most of Spellcheck, Part 2
You know Spellcheck, and in the previous post, you learned about language preferences and how to control them. Now we’ll look at the ways to run Spellcheck in Word and how they’re different. Running Spellcheck It might seem obvious that Spellcheck is running because you can see the red squiggly … [Read more...]
Make the Most of Spellcheck, Part 1
“Show me how to use Spellcheck” is one of the smartest requests an editor has ever made of me. I mean, what we typically do is learn just enough about software to get going, then never turn back. For my first ten years of editing, I was too busy meeting deadlines to learn any new skills. But once I … [Read more...]