![]() ![]() I this case, though, he focusses quite strongly and honestly on his feelings about his chance encounter with his half-crazy mother, so using lots of "was doing this" instead of "did this" removes the contrast of effective, strong language. When I say "she peered around" it's an immediate action, while "was peering" makes the reader much more aware that Sael is narrating the story - something I play off a lot since from his wider narrating it's clear he's writing it down as a chronicle or something, and uses a quite bored, abstracted way of relating a lot of events for a certain emotional effect - things he doesn't want to talk about. She around in confusion, and asked,īy saying "was peering" instead of "peered" I do put the action back one removed step, as it's meant to be past tense, and that sentence at least is in 3rd person. Microsoft word grammar check not working full#The full context of one example is:Īfter a second of staring in total confusion I realised that it was my mother. Yeah, but it's still not very good writing. So, let me go grab the latest unedited scene of my passive-voice riddled work and show you what I mean (this is set in past tense): I've used a website called which flags up all the passive voice in glowing purple, and seeing it like that made me understand how lazily I was constructing sentences - most times I could change it to something else, leaving the passive voice exclusively in thoughts, conversation, and a few scenes which start with a time skip and need some summarising. Everyone knows in their heart it's bad, but believes they can pull it off. It would be the same as them encountering alliteration of 4 or more words on every single page.Īs for passive voice, it's much more debated. ![]() However, if hundreds of them are being flagged up, you may want to cut back just because using any literary device too many times makes it boring for the reader. Generally if you're using sentences it thinks are fragments for drama, you're not doing anything wrong. Passive voice and fragment sentences are the number one thing I ignored in Word's checker when I was still using Word. It depends on the context of the story, really. They're no good for teaching you grammar. However, I wouldn't trust a grammar checker to correctly judge what is or isn't passive voice-grammar checkers are mindless things, and passive voice is pretty difficult to diagnose without understanding the sentence.Įdited to add: In fact, I'd say that grammar checkers are useful primarily to point out mistakes that you already _know_ are mistakes, but that you failed to see because they stem from a typo or a failure to complete an editing change. Passive voice is very often (certainly not always) a bad thing. Microsoft word grammar check not working how to#However, to know how to violate them with skill, I think that you need to know how to use them correctly in the first place, so that violation is a carefully crafted choice.įor the sentence "She ran," I'd need to see the context to have an opinion. Sometimes you'll deliberately violate grammar rules for effect. But that's not the same as saying that it has to be textbook-correct. Click to expand.The structure of a sentence is extremely important. ![]()
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