Microsoft Word is a word processor published by Microsoft. It is one of the office productivity applications included in the Microsoft Office suite. Originally developed by Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie, it was first released in 1983.
Microsoft Word allows you to create professional-quality documents, reports, letters, and résumés. Unlike a plain text editor, Microsoft Word has features including spell check, grammar check, text and font formatting, HTML support, image support, advanced page layout, and more.
Here we have some of the Writing Tips for Microsoft Word:
1. Learn About Article Structure
If you do not know how to structure your article properly, everything will look like a mess. This can be a challenge for creative writers, especially with broad subjects. However, there is a structure that you can easily follow. Always start with an announcement of the overall theme or topic. Then proceed to the introduction of the topic, the presentation, and the conclusion.
2. Keyboard Shortcuts Are Useful
One of the first things you should learn is the keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Word. You can improve your productivity a lot by using shortcuts, as this allows you to focus more on creative writing than formatting and other things.
3. Enhance Your Vocabulary
How often do you use Google to find synonyms of words that you want to use in your document? Well, did you know that Word has that feature already? All you have to do is select the word, right-click on it, and select Synonyms from the drop menu, as is shown below.
In addition, you should also learn more about the Researcher toolset. Most of us like to use Google when writing an article, whether you are trying to gather some information or make your document seem richer.
With the Researcher toolset, you can easily search up all kinds of information, and use filters to find higher quality content.
4. Text-to-Speech Is Quite Helpful
If you spent all day answering emails, creating presentations, and writing documents, you are probably tired. But if you aren't feeling like typing, and you need to make some documents, you should check out the Dictation feature in Word.
This feature works effortlessly; you can talk to your computer and type what you are saying. This is an Office add-in for not only Microsoft Word but also PowerPoint and Outlook.
One thing you should keep in mind is that if you are using Dictation to write your documents, it is always a good idea to check what you wrote before submitting the document.
5. Check Your Grammar
While we are on the topic of avoidable mistakes, Microsoft Word does a great job checking your grammar. It always has. But, with the newest updates, you have a lot more options to check out.
All you have to do is click on File -> Options and select Proofreading. You can see the pictures below.
From this many, you can select whatever you want. You can choose to have your document corrected as you type, check your grammar and style, or hide your spelling errors in case you are not writing in English.
There are advanced options as well, where you can add your own dictionary, correct mistakes you often make, etc.
6. Pay Attention to Your Word Count
The length of an article should depend on what you are writing about and your target audience. So what is the ideal length of an article? The longer the content, the more shares it will get. Studies have shown that posts that are over 3000 words long do well.
However, when your topic is not broad enough to cover 3000 words, it's always better to write shorter, more direct articles instead. Luckily for you, Word will keep track of the number of words as you write them. You can also select a sentence/paragraph to see how many words it has.
7. Autosave Your Work
As writers, we all want to make sure that we have backups for our backups. One of the worst things that can happen is to lose hours of work in just a second, which you can avoid.
Microsoft Word allows you to set up the AutoRecover option, which will also autosave your document. This means that if your document suddenly closes, Microsoft Word will recover your document for any number of reasons.
8. Create Notes for Yourself
It does not matter if you are working with an editor or you are editing the document by yourself, creating comments is a good way to keep yourself up-to-date. Sometimes, we just have too many things to deal with, and it is easy to forget important things.
For example, if you are unsure about something that you wrote and would like to get back to it a bit later, writing comments to that section of the document will help you remember later.
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