Checking style in proofing in Word 2016

Keep complaining to the help desk agent. I had to go through 4 of them with varying degrees of success. Finally after one sent me the link to set up the two spaces in the styles and proofing in 2013 when we talking about Word 2016. He sent me a link to the conversation afterwards. When I called back, I had the help desk agent refer to that conversation and he installed 2013 for me at no cost.  Of course, I lost Visio and Project Pro and he could not do anything about that so the agent said. Complain, Complain, Complain.  Keep after them. They know there are issues with the half-baked program that is wasting our money although they do not want to admit it is their issue.

Your students are fortunate to have you as their teacher.  You put your case eloquently.

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.

I think your post is great.  I would emphasize that part of the selling point of (and reasons for using) Microsoft Office is the tools that speed up the process of producing a good final product (like a paper, article, etc.).

As a case in point of how Microsoft nerfing the grammar checking features, “internalise” is the accepted British spelling, while “internalize” is the accepted American spelling. Having the option to highlight or not highlight Briticisms or Americanisms is the type of feature one would expect from a word processing program.

As to Suzanne's post, the expectations have changed in the last 50 years. What was acceptable in terms of time allotted for a project (e.g. a graduate thesis) is no longer. The expectation is that things will be produced much, much faster.  Moreover, if it were ok to type everything on a typewriter, why on earth would we spend money on Microsoft Office?

A large part of the problem with the nerfing is that Word now marks my two spaces after the end of a sentence as a grammar issue.  Having extra noise like that is unhelpful (it dilutes the value of legitimately identified grammar issues) and annoying (it distracts from the actual task at hand, i.e. producing a quality document).

BTW - I like your truism (it's very good point), but the truism, if I’m not mistaken, is actually that half the population is of below median intelligence (of course, below average is a close enough approximation).