Why can’t the English
Photo sourced via Wikimedia; photographer unknown
Kate Rice
Why is Microsoft Word like the English language? Because YOU can still get by if you do it rong.
English is spoken by more people than any other language in the world. It’s the dominant language to the extent that most native English speakers have little need to speak anything else.
Microsoft Word is similarly recognised as the worldwide standard. If you’re writing anything, anywhere, you’re probably using Microsoft Word, or something that looks a lot like it.
Many people use Microsoft Word every single day, and most of us learned it the same way we learned our native language: by using it. You don’t need to understand the parts of speech or grammar to use English, or to put all the words in the right order to be understood.
Nor do you need to know all the intricacies of Microsoft Word to knock out a decent-looking document. It’s an intuitive system that’s easy to use. My 87-year-old dad has had no training and little experience or practice, but he loves it. There are so many fun typefaces!
Yet both Microsoft Word and the English language are capable of a lot more than most users know. Microsoft Word has thousands of functions, tools and commands; English includes thousands of grammatical rules and roughly one million words.
Most people use nowhere near the full extent of the system or language capability. You don’t need to. Microsoft Word will even help you use the English language without you having to know how either of them really works.
Yet they will both trip you up when you least expect it, because you don’t know what you don’t know. Have you ever had trouble formatting a table, inserting a column, making all your headings look the same or numbering a list? Have you ever popped in an apostrophe without knowing whether it’s right, or realised that you’ve been using a word incorrectly for years?
The consequences of your mistakes are varied and weird. You’ll spend hours on a document googling how to fix it. You’ll misunderstand, miscommunicate, misread, misspeak or use the word ‘whom’ incorrectly when you’re trying to impress someone.
Microsoft Word and the English language are masters at giving you a false sense of security. Their dominance, flexibility and ease of use can easily make you think you’re a bit of a master at both.
Respecting their complexity is the first step in maximising your skills. Expert help and a little bit of training will save you time (which is money) and give you more clarity of thought and expression.
You’ll be able to identify exactly what you want to say, how you want to say it and why, and it will come out looking perfect. And in the meantime, there’s no shame in calling an editor – who knows the functions, the words, the rules and the fixes.
