Get writing assistance from Editor

- [Instructor] Here in Office 365 you have your own built in writing assistant called the editor. Checks more than just spelling and grammar. If you want it to, it'll help you become a better writer. You can access it by going to the review tab and selecting check document. This opens up the editor on the right hand side, and based on options you've selected, you'll see things like spelling, grammar, and under refinements, things like clarity and conciseness, formal language, and a number of other options that you have at your fingertips. You can access them from the settings link down at the bottom. Give that a click, takes you directly to the Word options proofing category, and down below is where you choose how you want to check your documents using the editor. You'll notice there's a writing style dropdown. Currently I'm showing grammar and refinements. If you simply want to check spelling and grammar you would change that to grammar only. You can also pick and choose your options using the settings button, give that a click. You'll see the writing style you just selected. I'm gonna go back to grammar and refinements, and change just a number of check boxes. And you can see several of them are checked off under grammar, and then as we get a little further down into clarity and conciseness, they may or may not be checked off, and we can pick and choose what it is we want to zero in on. Maybe jargon is one thing you want to keep, or if you want to avoid it, have it checked by leaving a check mark in that check box. Wordiness, as you go further down, you'll see formal language options. If you want to avoid using slang in this particular document, you'll want that checked off. Checking for informal language and contractions. These can be turned on and off with the click of a check box. You can see some other categories, including inclusive language. Resume options if that's what you're creating. There are a number of things to check when writing resumes. And vocabulary choice, you want to leave out cliches, collective nouns, and weak verbs, all of these options are available, and you can click okay once you've made your selections to save those changes. Click okay again, and you'll see the editor is updated with the options you've selected. Now using the editor, you can go through all of the results at once by clicking results up here at the top. It'll go through spelling, grammar, and refinements errors that it may need to update. Well, if you want to go from one to the next, you can pick and choose as well. Let's say I want to check spelling first, clicking spelling will take me to the first one. It looks like that's a word that needs a second r. The suggestions down below appear. All of those options you're familiar with, like ignoring and adding to the dictionary. Clicking the first one here, which is the correct spelling of spurred, will replace it and move on to the next one. Looks like annually is missing an l, and I can click that suggestion, and you can see spelling is now updated with a check mark indicating no further errors. Clicking grammar will do the same thing, and you can see here Sunrise Senior Center, and Center spelled e-r, without the comma. I might need to fix that with the suggested replacement. And now we're on to refinements for clarity and conciseness, formal language, and you'll see those underlined in your document with the gold dotted underline. I can check those now by going to each of those categories, as well. You can see, to simplify this, instead of saying filmmakers are able to, we can just say can, that's simple. Greatly reduce, well when we go back to clarity and conciseness, you can see reduce is the suggested replacement. So we're simplifying and creating some more clarity and conciseness in our writing style. It's all based on the settings. If that's something you're not worried about, and it all depends on the type of document you're working with, you can always go back to those settings and choose a different option. For example, if we want to leave out refinements, choosing grammar is gonna leave all those grammar check boxes checked, but as we go down further you can see the only thing that's checked off here for me is nominalizations under clarity and conciseness, which I can deselect, words expressing uncertainty, I can deselect those so nothing is selected all the way down. Clicking okay and okay again, of course is gonna update our editor, and we've already checked our spelling and grammar. We can see we're good to go. When you're done with the editor you simply close it up. Now if you also want to know the readability statistics for your document, that is another option that we see under the check document options. And we can get to those from file, then down to options at the bottom, there's proofing, and we're right back to all of those options, including something that allows us to understand the readability of our document, show readability statistics. When we click that and click okay, the next time we run the editor by clicking check document, it's gonna keep the options we've selected. Once we get to the end and everything's good, you'll notice readability statistics opens up and it's gonna show you things like word count, characters, paragraphs, sentences, all listed here in the right hand side. Average sentences per paragraph, words per sentence, characters per word, and then down below using different scales you'll see readability. There's the Flesch Reading Ease Scale, 39.3. Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is looking at 12.4. And look at the passive sentences, zero. Well that's something that's pretty good. We'll click okay to close that up. Click okay to confirm everything's complete, and close up the editor, a built in writing assistant at your fingertips.