Select ‘Set Proofing Language…’ and then choose the correct proofing language.Open the drop-down menu on the ‘Editor’ button.If you’re using the web version of Microsoft Word:
I wish I’d learned that before spending 20 minutes typing in feedback.If you write in numerous languages or your Microsoft Word is set up with the wrong proofing language, you probably want to know how to add more proofing languages or change your default one. It doesn’t persist after you close the file and open it again.
It’s basically “Select a command, don’t change anything, execute, and undo the thing you didn’t do.” I guess it’s somehow tricking the software into applying the styles it wasn’t letting you apply before.ĮDIT: Never mind. I have absolutely no idea why this works. This was discovered by messing around in Styles, swearing about how it didn’t do what I wanted, hitting Undo, and … huh. Now it’s good: all in English typing with the right spellcheck and so on. What is somehow working for me today - or at least it’s worked with a few files: The original word processors weren’t necessarily Word, so I suspect that could be a source of the problem.
Curiously, the PDFs look totally fine, even though on my computer their DOCX files have that weird “Chinese” English typing with fonts that aren’t quite right and incorrect spacing around parentheses, quotation marks, words broken up by line breaks, and so on. Fortunately I also had them send me PDFs, for exactly the reason that I feared their files would be somehow broken. Same issue happening again, with a bunch of essays that students have sent me. Oops, I should at least have given you a Like back in December for the suggestions. I come across weird random issues like this from time to time while editing manuscripts. If you don’t want to send the file, I also suspect this might be a styles thing - maybe you could try something similar to that guide for whatever style the bulk of the text is in and see whether it fixes the problem. That sometimes needs to be done separately via the styles menu. One thing this doesn’t seem to do, by the way, is apply the same language/dictionary to comments. That’s probably overkill, but I’ve had enough issues where I’ve realized partway through that the spellcheck isn’t fully working or that certain paragraphs are still in a different language/dictionary that now I do it every time.
I find that issues like this are common enough in Word that the first thing I do before editing any file is the following process (for Word 2010, Windows): The solution tends to depend on the issue, but I’m happy to take a look at the file and see whether I can reproduce the problem if you want to share it over PM (would delete it after in case there’s any confidentiality stuff involved, and in any case I have enough bad English on my computer to have any desire to collect more). What I’ve just done presumably wouldn’t work if there were multiple languages in the file, for example, or if there’s complicated formatting and settings you’re trying to preserve. So that at least is taken care of, but I’ll leave the question up, as I’ve had similar issues in the past with files that refuse to change languages, so I’m still curious if there are other solutions. I’ve tried copying the text into a new file, but nope, that doesn’t work either.Īny idea what’s going on here? (This experience is certainly making me a bit more forgiving of students who hand in homework from a file with Chinese rather than English settings, with the goofy line breaks and huge apostrophe gaps.)ĮDIT: OK, seem to have dodged / solved the issue by copying the text into a new OpenOffice file, changing the language in there to English, and then copying it back into a new Word file. I can toggle between “Chinese (China)” and “Chinese (Taiwan)”, but it refuses to accept English. OK, easy: highlight all, change the language at the bottom from Chinese to English or highlight all, Tools / Language, and set to English.
Plus spellcheck isn’t working, which is a bit worrying for a proofreading task.
Ings like words split in two at the end of the line they’re supposĮd to be in. But the problem is, the language of the text is set to “Chinese (China)”, despite everything being written in English, which is leading to all kinds of weird th
I’m trying to proofread an English-language Word file (Word 365 on a Mac).