Checking style in proofing in Word 2016

Anonymous

What happened to being able to check style in Word 2016 when proofing (number of spaces after a sentence, contractions, hyphenated words, etc.)??

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Anonymous

Those Style Options in Editor which were also part of earlier Office versions (e.g. Passive Voice) are now available for Office 2016 Click-to-Run perpetual users in Office build 16.0.7870.2020 and newer builds. New Grammar and Style options and other ongoing enhancements to the experience, will continue to be exclusively offered through an Office 365 subscription.

The "Grammar & More" Writing Style is not available in the drop down yet. To enable the Style Options in Word, go to File -> Options -> Proofing and click on the "Settings…" button next to the Writing Style drop down "Grammar". The Grammar Settings window will pop up where you can customize the checks. You will first see the available Grammar Options and when you scroll down, you will see the Style Options starting with Options for "Clarity & Conciseness".

Just check the checkbox next to the Options you'd like to enable.

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Anonymous

I can finally announce that the update is now available to all Office for Windows subscription users.

Apologies for the delay. The monthly updates always contain several new features or improvements and delays can unfortunately occur for many different reasons.

The English Style options are now available to all Windows Word and Outlook subscription users with Office build 16.0.7369.2024 or newer.

Office for Mac subscription Insiders Fast users are scheduled to receive the update with build 15.28.0.161004 or newer.

We appreciate your feedback. Please let us know if you see false flags (= incorrect flags/unexpected flags), missed flags or incorrect suggestions.

The Writing Style “Grammar & more” is now on by default. All Grammar Options and the two new Options “Wordiness” and “Nominalizations” are enabled. If you like to enable more Style Options, follow these steps:

In Word 2016:

Go to "File" -> "Options" -> "Proofing"
If the Writing Style is not "Grammar & more", please change to "Grammar & more" using the drop down.
Click on “Settings”

Only two Options ("Wordiness, Nominalizations") are enabled by default. You can enable more Options by ticking the checkbox next to them:

To enable the feature in Outlook, please do the following:

In Outlook 2016:

From a popped-out mail window, go to "File" -> "Options" -> "Mail". (Don't do this from the main Outlook window.)
Click on "Spelling and Autocorrect…" in the section "Compose messages". You'll be taken to the "Proofing" tab of the "Editor Options" dialog.
If the Writing Style is not "Grammar & more", please change to "Grammar & more" using the drop down.
Check the checkbox next to "Mark grammar errors as you type" in the "When correcting spelling in Outlook" section.

To enable more Style Options, please follow steps 3.) and 4.) described for Word above.

We've also included many bug fixes in this update.

We're working on improving the Grammar Checker further and will release more Options in the coming months.

Thanks, Nicole

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658 additional answers

Suzanne S Barnhill 279.2K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2016-09-06T18:42:21+00:00

We can settle this particular issue easily. I turned 72 yesterday. And yes, my master's thesis was typed (TYPED) without the help of a word processor of any kind. I considered myself very fortunate that (a) the thesis paper was Corrasable, and (b) I was allowed to use endnotes instead of footnotes. I typed papers and books for others for nearly 20 years, many of them with footnotes (LOTS of retyping if I underestimated the space required). I edited those papers on the fly as I typed. The style and formatting requirements were in my head(or in a style manual if I needed to refer to it). Many of today's current scholarly requirements date back to the typewriter era and can be very difficult to replicate using Word.
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Anonymous

2016-09-06T19:11:38+00:00

Belated congratulations on your birthday, Suzanne, but be careful, or there'll be a outbreak of thesis and typewriter warfare!

I agree that it is perfectly possible to do all sorts of things without heavy, or even any, reliance on machine-checking. All praise to you for that but, sadly, not everyone is as smart as you. While Western societies aspire to majority participation in higher education and lifelong learning, it is a truism that half of the population is of below-average intelligence.

Because so few people (including teachers and professors) are nowadays willing, or perhaps even able, to internalise everything that you did, papers and articles for publication are probably being machine-checked and down-graded or rejected in very inflexible ways.

So I suspect that folk, by no means all of whom are writing at postgrad level, need all the help they can get from their word-processor in order to comply with the requirements that are imposed on them.
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Anonymous

2016-09-06T19:31:44+00:00

I teach writing at a community college and tech institute. Many of my students are not native English speakers (or writers) and many more come from areas that appear not to value teaching writing skills.

The grammar and style aides are a god-send for these students. I teach them to use these tools to help bootstrap their skills and understanding of grammar and mainstream conventions. I do not use these aides to replace teaching style and grammar--in fact, these capabilities help to introduce concepts, and we often have fun discussing the oddities of our written language. With about 80 students a semester, these tools are indispensable.

Time and time again, my students thank me for turning them on to these aides; they gain confidence and over time, as they internalize the rules, their writing improves--and now I can't depend on these aides!

These students go on to have productive and useful lives as technicians, sales people, paralegals, tech support, engineers, auto repair staff, artists, accountants...

So all of you grammarians and stylistas-- well, la-de-da!
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