A colleague of mine recommended the book Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style to me. Communication is a critical component of most of my world, and I love languages.
The first chapter challenges the reader to spend one week eliminating the following words from written material (e.g., emails, memos, proposals):
- very
- rather
- really
- quite
- in fact
- surely
- actually
- just
- so
- pretty
- of course
- that said
I wanted some automated way to remind me when I use these words; however, I was unable to find a configuration or tool that would make these words stand out — for example, failing a spell check, thus yielding angry red squiggles.
My wife cleverly suggested adding custom rules to Microsoft Word’s auto-correct feature; you know, the one that seamlessly changes “teh” to “the” for you. The advantage to configuring Word in such a way is that you automatically get Outlook and OneNote for free as well, because those applications use the Word engine for text editing.
Instructions
Launch Microsoft Word, then locate the options screen. (Example for Word 2019: File, Options). Find the AutoCorrect options under the Proofing section.
On the AutoCorrect tab, type in the word you’d like Word to flag, then type in the replacement text. (I chose the same word bordered by asterisks so it would stand out.) Click Add to complete the operation.
Here’s how it looks if you type the word in a sentence…
If you intended to use the word, just backspace the correction and retype the word; AutoCorrect won’t engage in that case, but will engage the next time you type it. My workflow typically includes a quick proofread before doing the next thing on a document; now I scan for “***” in my text.
Note: You may need to restart Outlook and OneNote to see the AutoCorrect settings applied.
Conclusion
I look forward to trying this out for a week, if nothing else to see how often I use these words at work. Should certain words become problematic, the same interface can be used to delete them from the AutoCorrect list.
Here’s to better writing!