Microsoft Editor

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From Microsoft:

Get intelligent writing assistance

Write with confidence across documents, email, and the web. With features that help strengthen your spelling, grammar, and style, let Microsoft Editor be your intelligent writing assistant.

. . . .

Have help anywhere you write

See Editor’s suggestions in Word, Outlook, and on your favorite sites. Try Editor in Outlook and download the browser extension to have Editor’s assistance across the web.

Get suggestions in different languages

Receive basic guidance in more than 20 languages, and spelling suggestions in more than 80, to help you communicate clearly, no matter what language you’re writing in.

. . . .

Get help with the basics of spelling, grammar, and punctuation for free. Receive advanced grammar and stylistic feedback on clarity, conciseness, formality, vocabulary, and other premium features with Microsoft 365.

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PG and Mrs. PG aren’t likely to move away from Grammarly unless/until MS Editor becomes substantially more effectively than Grammarly.

However, PG would be interested in the experiences of others with MS Grammar. Feel free to drop a comment to this post or click on the Comment button on the main toolbar, just below the banner image.

8 thoughts on “Microsoft Editor”

  1. I swore off Grammarly when the actor in one of their television ads described a run-on sentence as “a really long sentence.” The length of a sentence or the number of words in a sentence has no bearing on whether a sentence is “run-on,” and a company bold enough to include “grammar” in its name should know that.

  2. I don’t use anything. And I certainly don’t use anything to check my style. It’s taken me years to polish it! British writers find that US based software does weird things to our writing, like – er – disliking the passive voice, as well as describing things as ‘passive’ when they’re not. I switch everything off in Word, so that I can get on with writing, and then run the spellcheck at the end. I’m teaching it Scots, slowly but surely. Good words like dreich and drookit and gallus. I have an editor, but she has a light touch. We discuss things in Track Changes. I trust her, she asks a lot of questions but never rewrites. Sometimes it gets complicated, but almost always where I have already had misgivings about something. She’s a brilliant editor.

    • I’m getting ready to uninstall MS Editor.

      I find the prompts it gives me in Chrome are both annoying and (IMHO) wrong. It’s not intelligent enough to consider context when it’s applying its rules.

    • I write in one of the American English dialects myself – and the grammar checkers are annoyingly useless there, too. I did have to use the blasted things when writing college papers.

      They are especially useless for fiction. Unless your characters are all exactly the same culture, and that culture happens to be Ivy League Graduate, following the recommendations will destroy all of your efforts at characterization.

      Spell check is fine for the first run on typos (with the proper custom dictionary).

      As for the “readability index” – faugh. Some years ago, with a much earlier version of Word (IIRC, I was running it on Windows 3.11), I tried it out with a sample from an eighth grade reader published near the beginning of the last century. It rated it as college sophomore level (14th grade). Who knows what one would do now after several years of more “development.” Would any sentence of more than 140 characters push something into “college level”?

      • Oh, I used to have an open source tool, adapted from Unix systems I believe. It would take a text file, pull out every unique word, and then sort them by using different lists in other text files. (Such as one list of the character names, one of place names, a big list of English words, etc.)

        I should try to find that code again among my various archives (which mirror my office organization, sigh…). One thing that I have noticed, both while final editing my writing and in some published pieces, are unfortunate different spellings of proper names.

  3. I like Grammarly but I find it inconsistent in WordPress. Sometimes it loads and analyses the paragraph, sometimes it doesn’t. Not sure if it is a block editor thing or free vs. premium, but I find it hard to justify $12 a month for it. If/when I get back to writing more in Word, I’ll think about it, but most of my stuff is blogging…

    P.

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