Microsoft Word help needed

[Barbara]

Any Word experts here?

My Word keeps highlighting some nouns which it thinks should be in plural. It happens mainly when I use sentence fragments. i.e 'The burner phone.' Word then highlights 'phone', and suggest 'phones'. It tells me that the subject and verb should agree in number, and that they should either both be singular or both be plural, and 'Barbara, for God's sake, learn English.'

It also does this in dialogue too, as in:

'How much money do you need?'
'Five grand.'

It highlights 'grand' because according to Word-Smarty-Pants it should be 'grands'.

I can ignore it once but when I open the doc next time, the 'offending' nouns are highlighted again.

And just to be difficult, it doesn't do this on every occasion.

Sigh.

Anyone know how to sort this? I'd rather not send my MS off with stuff highlighted like this.

 

[KateESal]

How about turning off the grammar check altogether?

I did because I found it so annoying.

 

[Barbara]

Aha. Sounds like the perfect plan. Erm, @KateESal how do I do that? I'm hopeless.

 

[Steve C]

In Word click 'File' top left
near the bottom of drop-down menu click 'options'
click 'proofing'
Bottom of new window tick two boxes to hide spelling and grammar errors
Click OK

 

[Barbara]

In Word click 'File' top left
near the bottom of drop-down menu click 'options'
click 'proofing'
Bottom of new window tick two boxes to hide spelling and grammar errors
Click OK

Excellent. Found it. Thank you very much.

Relief.

I miss pen and paper.

 

[Carol Rose]

Microsoft Word’s grammar check is useless!! Glad you turned it off.

 

[Emily]

Thank you, Barbara, for asking this and for all the excellent replies! I've been meaning to ask too

 

[Dan Payne]

I don't think the grammar settings come with the document, so turning it off for yourself won't affect how others see it. Similarly, someone else reading it with different language settings, grammar and autocorrect settings or regional settings on their machine may see things highlighted differently to how it appears to you. I wouldn't sweat it.

 

[Barbara]

I don't think the grammar settings come with the document, so turning it off for yourself won't affect how others see it. Similarly, someone else reading it with different language settings, grammar and autocorrect settings or regional settings on their machine may see things highlighted differently to how it appears to you. I wouldn't sweat it.

Ah, that's good to know. Thank you.

I was also partly sweating it because some of the dialogue is in broken English (Russians talking) making those sections look rather busy with blue grammar squiggles. I guess the MS will just have to look busy with blue squiggles. Yikes.

 

[KateESal]

What Dan said. I suspect "professional" readers can tell where the writer has accidentally messed up their grammar or has chosen to use various grammatical no-noes in the name of textual integrity.

 

[Barbara]

What Dan said. I suspect "professional" readers can tell where the writer has accidentally messed up their grammar or has chosen to use various grammatical no-noes in the name of textual integrity.

That's very true. I guess it's the presentation side of it that worries me most. It might be annoying to read something with lots of underlined stuff, esp where there's big chunks of dialogue with the Russians.

Thanks all for your input. Some of this is in order.

 

[E G Logan]

highlighting some nouns which it thinks should be in plural.

You can turn off bits of Word selectively. I choose not to use the 'change grammar' part, because that used to drive me to tearing my hair out.

There is probably an online manual for whatever version you are using -- I wish they would send them out with the updates! And I found an online Word tutorial that was immensely useful. Sadly I didn't keep the link.

 

[Dean Baxter]

I've had similar problems. I had the 'five grand' thing too. Writing five-grand cured that. Still, it is annoying. Mine seams to be set on American, as it doesn't like words such as 'colour'. Ha! Neither does this; it just put a red line on it. Wait. I have been spelling colour right, right? Anyway, can't really help, but it's nice to share.

 

[Dean Baxter]

I've had similar problems. I had the 'five grand' thing too. Writing five-grand cured that. Still, it is annoying. Mine seams to be set on American, as it doesn't like words such as 'colour'. Ha! Neither does this; it just put a red line on it. Wait. I have been spelling colour right, right? Anyway, can't really help, but it's nice to share.

Although, in my book, it was a hundred-grand. So I'm better. X

 

[Dean Baxter]

...Carol.

 

[Monarch]

Any time you have a problem in Word, or with anything else, just Google “how do I [so and so] in Word,” or “why does Word always [so and so,]” etc. It usually provides a quick and concise answer.

 

[KateESal]

@Monarch is right.

Nowadays, I'm not sure how I would operate in the digital realm (or many others, come to think of it) without the vast wisdom of the internet. I'm always asking *insert preferred search engine here* stupid questions and being continually amazed and delighted to find the answers. How on earth did we survive without it?!

 

[Steve C]

How on earth did we survive without it?

Same way we always did - by asking someone or looking up the answer in a book. The internet is only young, in terms of general use less than 25 years old. Before it, people spoke to each other and wrote letters as a way of communicating. Overall it seems to have been a bad thing for young people with depression and suicides amongst them at record highs largely attributed to the demands of social media. It makes our job as writers considerably easier but also means the volume of books out there has skyrocketed with fewer people willing to read them. Word processors are particularly handy. I don't think I would ever get beyond 20 pages without one. Using a typewriter Typex would have been my friend. People like Ernest Hemingway probably thought its invention to be a game-changer just as we now think The Google is.

 

[KateESal]

Indeed (I'm old enough to remember...it was a flippant, rhetorical question!)

But finding information is so much quicker and easier than it used to be, thanks to the web and I'm grateful for that.

Your points about the drawbacks of the internet are entirely valid. Like every new medium, it has its advantages and disadvantages and it's very open to abuse. Personally, I'm not letting my kids have smart phones for a while yet and I limit the time they spend online. Like everything, it's important to have a balance on how and how often the internet is used.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

The internet is a boon, for sure, but it's foolish to rely on everything it tells you. There's a tendency among folk who don't think to accept as gospel truth what Google tells them. For example, were I to state online that a banana is really a vegetable, some people would believe me. It's not, it's a herb and it's a berry!

Fact-checking my crime novels takes ages. Recent discoveries about DNA and fingerprints have changed how cases are prosecuted, but if you accept old thinking about them, then your story is immediately obsolete. DNA is easily spread by touch and sneezing allowing DNA to 'drift', while fingerprints are not as unique as once thought.

Did you know, that in pre-internet days, some publishers used to include deliberate mistakes in their non-fiction books, as well as shpelling mishtakes, to prevent plagiarism?

 

[Leonora]

I think agents and editors read on Kindle, so that probably wouldn't show word grammar and spelling corrections.

 

[KateESal]

An awful lot of them do their reading on IPads....

 

[Monarch]

I drive a truck in the US and today I picked up a load in an underground cave complex in Carthage, Missouri. I was stuck in the dock for four hours, but, being underground, there was no cell signal. I could not make any calls (and I had a few to make,) and I could not download my book from the cloud to work on it. Of the thirty or so apps on my iPad, I think only three functioned without either a cell or WiFi connection, i.e., kindle, audible, and Librivox. Usually I can get a signal about anywhere, but today I felt like I’d lost my best friend, lol.

 

[RK Wallis]

Great photo @Monarch

 

[CageSage]

I can get a signal about anywhere

In Australia we have so many blackspots that there are good sales of sat-phones - but even sat-phones can be blocked by smoke and bad weather. The recent fires raised the issue of using apps to notify people - because they didn't work in the conditions! Line of sight and towers ... or do we expect too much from such a new technology?

 

[Monarch]

Line of sight and towers

Maybe 5G will help . . . whatever 5G is. Guess I’d better ask Google, lol.

 

[CageSage]

5G

That may be what they expect us to believe, but no towers, no power, all then means no mobile (what we say instead of cell) coverage. All the people who live beyond the coastal cities (okay, not that many in the big scheme of things, but cattle stations, big farms, indigenous communities) don't have much in the way of internet or other forms of communication (unless they have satellite links).
We have a lot of land in the middle, but not many people who can or would live there ...

 

[Monarch]

That may be what they expect us to believe, but no towers, no power, all then means no mobile (what we say instead of cell) coverage. All the people who live beyond the coastal cities (okay, not that many in the big scheme of things, but cattle stations, big farms, indigenous communities) don't have much in the way of internet or other forms of communication (unless they have satellite links).
We have a lot of land in the middle, but not many people who can or would live there ...

That goes back to my truck driving post. . . . No internet? I guess I’d hate being being a truck driver in Australia, mate!