Impress Your Teachers with Great Essays When You Learn Microsoft^® Word

Writing by hand is so last decade. Anyone who is anyone gets on the computer these days and types. Some of us type slow and some of us type fast, but either way, the way we write is changing and becoming more efficient and tree friendly.

Learning Microsoft Word is not a difficult process, but learning to have it work for you and help you where you need help will require a bit of exploration. Typing a Word document is simple. Did you know that Word will help you with your grammar and punctuation? Did you know that you can program Word to help you with your most commonly misspelled words? Did you know that when you learn Microsoft Word you can create and use different writing formats depending on what you need to write?

There is a world of resources out there to help you learn Microsoft Word, but before you get out there and start searching, let’s talk about a few features Word has that will help you create better Word documents.

Helping Out with Grammar

Students who learn Microsoft Word and use it in school, gain a better understanding of common grammatical errors. Microsoft Word documents are programmed to pick out common and uncommon grammatical errors so you, the author, can spot and fix them quickly and easily. When you learn Microsoft Word, you are given a list of suggestions to help fix your mistake and even a tutorial that will help explain what the mistake was and how to avoid it next time. With a green, squiggly underline, grammatical errors are easy to find and even easier to fix.

EXAMPLE: Both apples and oranges.

In a Word document, this sentence would be underlined in green, if you right-click the mouse over the indicated sentence, Word will tell you why it is incorrect and offer you grammar suggestions. In this case, the sentence is a sentence fragment. Don’t know what a sentence fragment is? When you learn Microsoft Word, you will learn how to access the Office Assistant. He will help answer your questions and tell you how to fix them. In this case, you should consider:

Microsoft Word will also help you fix common grammatical errors, by automatically capitalizing “I” in a sentence or adding apostrophes to words like “can’t” and “won’t.” It’s typing made easy, when you learn Microsoft Word. 

Correcting Your Spelling

Students, let’s be honest, spelling is tough. Really tough in fact! Words can be long and difficult or they aren’t spelled like they sound. When you learn Microsoft Word, you will gain a spelling assistant automatically. Your misspelled words will be underlined with a red squiggly line. When you roll your mouse over the misspelled word and right-click it, a list of word options will appear. Choose from the list and find the word you meant to spell. It’s as easy as that!

Are there certain words that you always misspell? You can program Word to automatically correct them for you! Under the Tools menu, select AutoCorrect. You can add words that you commonly misspell and this will tell Word to correct them for you whenever they are typed incorrectly. You no longer have to go back through to find and correct these common errors yourself. When you learn Microsoft Word time spent typing is also time spent learning.

Writing an Article with Columns and Changing Your Paragraph Spacing

As a student, the number of pages assigned is usually too many. Did you know that with Word you can change the indents and line spacing? Some teachers will ask you to use 1.5” spacing or 2” spacing if you are lucky! These affect how your text appears on the Word document. With more line spacing, pages fill up with less wordage. It’s every students dream. If you want to learn Microsoft Word for school, be sure to talk to your teachers about the spacing they want in your essays. The last thing you want is to hand in your work and have it handed back to you because it wasn’t long enough and the spacing was wrong.

While this may be a fun way to try and write less but get the number of pages you need, line and paragraph spacing is actually a very helpful tool to know when you learn Microsoft Word and use it for class. With line spacing you can change your essay or articles readability. Small font and spacing makes for a very dense and, perhaps at times, cluttered essay. If you are going to use a larger font, use smaller spacing. If you are using a smaller font, larger spacing will be helpful when the time comes to edit and hand in your final copy.