The reason Microsoft Word prefers ‘corporate speak’, phrases and language but there is more than one way to change Word’s grammar and style suggestions to suit you.
Quite often on social media there are complaints about Microsoft Word’s grammar and style suggestions like this one.
“MS Word suddenly dislikes the phrase “in order to.” Who programs this stuff? Corporate accountants?”
Corporate is the right word
GreyOwlStudio is on the right track with the word “corporate”. The default grammar and style settings in Word are for businesses which is the largest market for Microsoft Office.
Those settings don’t suit everyone and certainly not anyone doing more creative writing.
We could talk about how the Grammar and Style settings could be better organized and available but we know that such feedback will fall on deaf ears at Microsoft.
Instead, let’s focus on what can be done to make the Grammar and Style settings suit your writing.
Suggestions not orders
First, let’s deal with the notion that Microsoft Word is telling anyone what to write. It’s not.
Word is making suggestions with blue underlines that you can accept or reject.
Not a word is changed for grammar or style “refinements” reasons without the user’s approval. Some common spelling errors are automatically fixed but not grammar or style matters.
If you don’t like Word’s suggestions, teach it to stop the ones that aren’t appropriate for you.
Don’t like a suggestion? Ignore it … three times!
If you don’t like a blue underline suggestion you can ignore it in three different ways.
- Leave the blue underline text in place and do nothing.
- Ignore this time. Click on the word/phrase and choose the ‘slashed circle’ Ø or Stop icon.
This choice removes the blue underline for this time only. Word will continue to check for that type of grammar or style issue in that document.
- Always Ignore. Disable that grammar/style check for all future documents on that computer. Microsoft calls that “Stop checking for this”.
Stop the Word suggestions you don’t like – three different ways
Using the “Stop checking for this” option you can gradually block the Word checks/suggestions that you don’t want in ANY document.
Or go to File | Options | Proofing | Grammar and Refinements | Settings and select which options you like or dislike. For example ‘Wordiness’ will stop the “In order to …” suggestion.
No checks for one document only
Another choice is to disable either spelling or grammar/refinements checks for the current document only. That’s just below the Grammar and Refinements option, mentioned above.
File | Options | Proofing | Exceptions for:
- Hide spelling errors in this document only
- Hide grammar errors in this document only
