I’m trying to proofread an English-language Word file (Word 365 on a Mac). But the problem is, the language of the text is set to “Chinese (China)”, despite everything being written in English, which is leading to all kinds of weird th
ings like words split in two at the end of the line they’re suppos
ed to be in [sic]. Plus spellcheck isn’t working, which is a bit worrying for a proofreading task.
OK, easy: highlight all, change the language at the bottom from Chinese to English; or highlight all, Tools / Language, and set to English. Which I’ve done, many times. But nothing changes. I can toggle between “Chinese (China)” and “Chinese (Taiwan)”, but it refuses to accept English. I’ve tried copying the text into a new file, but nope, that doesn’t work either.
Any idea what’s going on here? (This experience is certainly making me a bit more forgiving of students who hand in homework from a file with Chinese rather than English settings, with the goofy line breaks and huge apostrophe gaps.)
Thanks in advance!
EDIT: OK, seem to have dodged / solved the issue by copying the text into a new OpenOffice file, changing the language in there to English, and then copying it back into a new Word file. So that at least is taken care of, but I’ll leave the question up, as I’ve had similar issues in the past with files that refuse to change languages, so I’m still curious if there are other solutions. What I’ve just done presumably wouldn’t work if there were multiple languages in the file, for example, or if there’s complicated formatting and settings you’re trying to preserve.
I come across weird random issues like this from time to time while editing manuscripts. The solution tends to depend on the issue, but I’m happy to take a look at the file and see whether I can reproduce the problem if you want to share it over PM (would delete it after in case there’s any confidentiality stuff involved, and in any case I have enough bad English on my computer to have any desire to collect more).
I find that issues like this are common enough in Word that the first thing I do before editing any file is the following process (for Word 2010, Windows):
Select all (Ctrl + A) and set the language to English (U.S.) at the bottom of the screen. Then click the “Proofing errors were found” button to start a spell check.
Repeat.
Select the entire text manually with the mouse and do the same.
Select all of the main text (excluding any field codes containing references etc. at the end) and do the same.
That’s probably overkill, but I’ve had enough issues where I’ve realized partway through that the spellcheck isn’t fully working or that certain paragraphs are still in a different language/dictionary that now I do it every time. One thing this doesn’t seem to do, by the way, is apply the same language/dictionary to comments. That sometimes needs to be done separately via the styles menu.
If you don’t want to send the file, I also suspect this might be a styles thing - maybe you could try something similar to that guide for whatever style the bulk of the text is in and see whether it fixes the problem.
Oops, I should at least have given you a Like back in December for the suggestions. Apologies!
Same issue happening again, with a bunch of essays that students have sent me. Fortunately I also had them send me PDFs, for exactly the reason that I feared their files would be somehow broken. Curiously, the PDFs look totally fine, even though on my computer their DOCX files have that weird “Chinese” English typing with fonts that aren’t quite right and incorrect spacing around parentheses, quotation marks, words broken up by line breaks, and so on.
The original word processors weren’t necessarily Word, so I suspect that could be a source of the problem.
What is somehow working for me today - or at least it’s worked with a few files:
Put the cursor in a paragraph. (Anywhere really would probably work.)
Select Format / Style.
Apply. Don’t even change anything. Just apply. The paragraph will have changed a bit. It doesn’t matter.
Undo: Command-Z on a Mac. Now it’s good: all in English typing with the right spellcheck and so on. It’s what I wanted!
This was discovered by messing around in Styles, swearing about how it didn’t do what I wanted, hitting Undo, and … huh. Whaddya know.
I have absolutely no idea why this works. It’s basically “Select a command, don’t change anything, execute, and undo the thing you didn’t do.” I guess it’s somehow tricking the software into applying the styles it wasn’t letting you apply before.
EDIT: Never mind. It doesn’t persist after you close the file and open it again. I wish I’d learned that before spending 20 minutes typing in feedback.
Perhaps more accurately, “Ah, COVID!” I have several reasons I’ve always preferred marking essays on paper, rather than computer files. Bizarre formatting is one of those reasons. Alas, handing in and then returning pieces of paper has now become impractical.
For my own use, I do mostly use OpenOffice for word processing. It’s a hell of a lot more predictable, or perhaps I’ve just got better control over it. But in recent years I’ve needed to do more editing with the files I’ve been given, and return papers with tracked changes - and that means Word, because I’m not going to get whole organizations to change the way they handle computer files. Does OpenOffice mostly work, yes, but not 100%.
When I open the student files with OpenOffice, even weirder things happen. And god knows what it’ll look like with Track Changes & Comments later in the process.
I very deliberately bought a new iPad and Apple Pencil last week, in hope that it’ll be a good way to mark PDFs, but I haven’t yet spent the time necessary to set up the iPad and learn a new workflow.
As for marking up PDFs on a computer … ouch. Possible, but agonizingly slow, at least the way I’m doing it now.
Thanks - I do this with PDFs all the time, but while it’s a reasonable process for reading, highlighting, and note-taking, I find it very slow for marking. I haven’t tried using Acrobat for this, but regularly use Preview and PDFPen on my Mac.
At this stage there is no way I’m going to ask students to make corrections for these things. I’ve already got 3-4 versions of each of these files, with at least one email for each. I don’t want yet another level. If this distance learning continues into next semester I’ll be looking into better options for sharing editing with students, but I’m not going to introduce that into my teaching at this stage of the school year.
i have used google documents on one or two projects with work, we’ve been able to group edit spreadsheets as work was done and not have multiple versions flying around.
i don’t know if its worth a try for you, and on another note when i have formatting issues, sometimes i can only sort it out by cutting and pasting into a new document.
I use PDF Expert for everything and insist coworkers send everything, even simple image files, in PDF format. It’s $50/yr for all the features, but all worth it if you work with PDFs daily.
Yeah, that’ll often work, but one of the things I’m marking these papers for is how well they’re following MLA style - so if I do that, who knows what’ll happen to their indents, margins, hanging indents, headers, etc. I’ve successfully copied the “broken” text into a new file, and made it look correct, but it’s also lost some of the other formatting. I may wind up working through them that way anyway. Fortunately this weird font issue “only” appears on five or six of the assignments.
As I said above, I spend a lot of time with PDFPen - looks like the two have got a similar feature set, although I also use PDFPen’s OCR a lot. But for the kind of editing I’m doing with the student papers - rewriting occasional sentences, moving stuff around - a word processor’s a lot more useful than a PDF editor.