allow me to vent for a second.

i am really annoyed with Microsoft Office’s new ‘editing’ tool which does tons of style ‘corrections’ beyond just regular grammar and spell check. I would guess grammarly may have a lot of the same issues, but i’m not sure. my annoyance is that... in the new ‘editing’ tool, 1. it is very hard to turn off all the style ‘corrections’ which should realistically only be optional since they aren’t actually a matter of good or bad writing, and 2. these style corrections are very clearly geared toward specific forms of writing (business/school) which means when applying them to say personal articles you write or fictional stories, they can push ‘correction’ suggestions on you which completely ruin the intent you were aiming for. And when all you want to do is quickly double check you made no typos, and made no grammar mistakes, instead it highlights dozens (to hundreds) of other areas that actually need no corrections.

I tried to edit a novel just to check for spelling/grammar errors, and it wanted to correct hundreds of things which were style-only. Like X isn’t good for resumes (no kidding its a NOVEL), maid isn’t gender neutral (yes its not because this is a novel choosing words for specific effects not a work document), trying to change certain comma’d lists from “smart and diligent, cold and ruthless” into “smart, and diligent, cold, and ruthless” which... novels break up sentences in specific stylistic ways to make the writing read/flow a specific way... to move the commas in this case would ruin the rhythm the author wanted you to read it in. Basically... the ‘style corrections’ tool was giving me hundreds of not-real errors to sort through, slowing down me immensely, and these style corrections Aren’t True Errors. They’re useful OPTIONAL features, if you’re writing say a work document or resume and need to word yourself professionally. They absolutely butcher fictional writing, and I’m guessing if you wrote a literary analysis this tool would also be giving a ton of not-real-errors to correct every time you use a quote from the literary work. :c

:c :c :c

On the one hand, I’m very happy such new tools exist to help people figure out how to stylistically word themselves better. The skill of figuring out how to word something professionally in a work setting can be difficult, and its good as a tool to offer. 

But the fact these tools seem to slant that way Mandatorily and require so much tech skill to turn off (I had to go in and dig to turn most of these off and i still have so many accidentally turned on i’m still getting 50-200 false-errors flagged per writing piece I proofread), i cannot imagine is going to have a good effect on people’s abilities to learn how to creatively write moving forward. Or for people to be self-aware of how varied language effects your impression on your reader. And since a specific company, specific software, is the ‘guide’ being forced for correcting one’s writing stylistically, of course that can always lead to new biases in writing overall. The biases the software was made with, that the designers inherently had and were never questioned for, and people will ‘correct’ their work to reflect those software internal biases. And so while to a degree, the ‘style corrections’ will help people write more professional technical less uninclusive writing, the dependency on a software to decide what is correctly those things will mean some biases in the system will reflect into everyone’s writing using it if not proof read for that by the writer personally. TLDR: while such stylistic tools are helpful in the way another pair of eyes are in a writing group, beware of relying on them as the end all be all of correct. The software is inherently biased toward specific types of prose which your writing may not benefit from, and any inherent biases that are uninclusive or unhelpful may bleed into the software corrections so any corrections should always be read over by YOU later to make sure the writing is actually doing what is intended and not something wrong. 

And then, the other criticism: as USUAL microsoft office still flags a lot of grammar as incorrect which is in fact correct, so i still have to double check all of its grammar-flagged areas and fix them myself if they are wrong (since microsoft office at least half the time suggests an incorrect fix). So writers are going to STILL need the skill of understanding grammar enough to proofread their own documents, since these ‘correction tools’ are still not fully reliable in that aspect (except now writers will need to sort through grammar errors they need to fix themselves AND a bunch of flagged-stylistic stuff which may have been completely purposeful and needs no changes). :/ 

basically, critically read, and always proofread your own writing and edits others (and especially Programs) make to your writing. Programs have their own built in biases which you can’t just assume are perfect, and as always at least with microsoft office lol i’m still seeing it tag a lot of things as ‘errors’ that either aren’t errors or need to be corrected in a Different way than microsoft office suggests. 

Anyway. Does anyone have a guide to point me to, for turning off ALL of microsoft’s style-corrections? I only need the spell check and grammar check (and the grammar check as usual I still end up needing to fix but at least sometimes it highlights the weird areas so I can find them faster).