This document provides links to descriptions of the tools available in Microsoft office for a person seeking to improve their use of the English language. With the emphasis on content, these tools are good way to focus on what a student is thinking while have the technology improve their presentation. While we may think of such tools as a crutch, people who use do literally learn to prevent errors by the virtue of the machine being unwilling to ignore errors.

Microsoft Word

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/listen-to-your-word-documents-5a2de7f3-1ef4-4795-b24e-64fc2731b001

There are many reasons to listen to a document, such as proofreading, multitasking, or increased comprehension and learning. Word makes listening possible by using the text-to-speech (TTS) ability of your device to play back written text as spoken words. There are multiple tools for listening to your Word documents:

Read Aloud reads all or part of your document. You can use Read Aloud on its own or within Immersive Reader for Word in Windows and MacOS.

Immersive Reader is a set of tools that help improve reading fluency and comprehension. For more information about Immersive Reader, see Learning Tools in Word.

Speak reads only the text you've selected. Speak is available for Windows only. For more information about Speak, see Use the Speak text-to-speech feature to read text aloud.

Narrator is the Windows Screen reader app that reads your dialog boxes, buttons, and other user interfaces as well as the text. For more information about Narrator, see Using Windows Narrator in Office for the web.

Speech is a built-in accessibility feature of MacOS. When you set up Speech preferences in your Mac system preferences, you can select text and have it read by pressing a keyboard combination you’ve defined.

https://prod.support.services.microsoft.com/en-us/office/check-grammar-spelling-and-more-in-word-0f43bf32-ccde-40c5-b16a-c6a282c0d251

Check grammar, spelling, and more in Word
Microsoft Editor runs in Word for Microsoft 365 to analyze your document and offer suggestions for spelling, grammar, and stylistic issues, like making sentences more concise, choosing simpler words, or writing with more formality.

https://prod.support.services.microsoft.com/en-us/office/show-word-count-3c9e6a11-a04d-43b4-977c-563a0e0d5da3

Show word count
Word counts the number of words in a document while you type. Word also counts pages, paragraphs, lines, and characters.

https://prod.support.services.microsoft.com/en-us/office/find-and-replace-text-c6728c16-469e-43cd-afe4-7708c6c779b7

Find and replace text

Word has the capacity to search through a document for a given string of text and replace each occurrence of that text string with another set of characters provided by the user. For example, suppose you have the phrase “in memoriam” in the document and you wish to replace it with the phrase “as a monument to,” This tool will find all occurrences of “in memoriam” and put in each place the phrase “as a monument to.”