While Word can't give a student the skills essential to writing a meaningful, coherent essay, Word can certainly provide the tools that make it easier for the student to focus on ideas, tone, and words, rather than on the technicalities of just getting words on paper (even electronic paper).

The ability to experiment with structure and formatting, to really "see" how an essay looks, can help the young writer see how her ideas come together. Likewise, making a habit of proofreading ensures that the writer takes one last read-through of an essay before she hands it off. In Word the Outline view, the spelling and grammar checker features, and the Thesaurus can ease the difficult road to writing a great essay. Here's how.

What is the Outline view?

The Outline view automatically interprets a document's organization based on its headings and presents the document as broken into heading level and topics. Different ideas are represented by the different levels of headings.

Using the Outline view in Word is an easy way for students to see the structure of their paper. Students can easily tell how the main ideas are ordered and rearrange them if necessary. All they need to do is highlight a heading and move it to the appropriate location in the essay, and all the content beneath the heading moves with it.

You can ask your students to build an outline for an essay first. Once the students have organized their main ideas as headings, they can begin to add points that support each heading. Students can continue to work in the Outline view, or they can switch to the Normal or Print Layout view, depending on the view they are most comfortable working in. If they need to, they can always switch back to the Outline view to review their basic structure.

To use the Outline view

• On the View menu in Word, click Outline.

To return to the Normal or Print Layout view

• On the View menu in Word, click Normal or Print Layout.

What are the spelling and grammar tools?

Word includes spelling and grammar checker features that check spelling and grammar automatically as you type. A red underline indicates a possible spelling error, and a green underline indicates a possible grammar problem. Word offers alternative spellings and suggests grammar corrections.

The spelling and grammar tools don't do the work for your students. Students will still be challenged to recognize words and rules of grammar, because they still must learn to recognize the correct suggestions from Word and the proper usage based on context. For example, the word "red" would not be underlined as a misspelling because it's the name of a color, but it would be misspelled if the student meant to write that he had "read" a book.

These tools can help point out the obvious errors for students to work on, but they don't allow careless composition. Thus, students would need to learn copyediting skills as well when using the spelling and grammar tools.

To run the spelling and grammar checker manually

• On the Tools menu, click Spelling and Grammar. Students can do a spelling and grammar check of the entire document manually at any point while they are working.

To run the spelling and grammar checker automatically

1. On the Tools menu, click Options and then click the Spelling & Grammar tab.
2. Select the Check spelling as you type check box.
3. Select the Check grammar as you type check box.

What is the Thesaurus?

In Word, the Thesaurus lets students look up a list of synonyms for a word or find its definition in the Microsoft Office dictionary. You can encourage students to increase their vocabulary by looking for synonyms and by learning the various meanings of words they use.

To look up synonyms or definitions

1. Select or type the word you want to look up.
2. On the Tools menu, point to Language and then click Thesaurus.

— or —

1. Select or type the word to look up.
2. Click the right mouse button.
3. Either point to Synonyms to see a list of synonymous words, or click Thesaurus to look up the definition of the word.

More information

For more teaching and learning resources, see the Microsoft Education Web site.