Microsoft Word has evolved beyond a simple spellchecker. Modern versions include an advanced Grammar and Style engine that constantly analyzes your sentence structure. If you write a sentence in the passive voice, use a cliché, or write a sentence that Word considers “too wordy,” it will automatically underline the text with a squiggly blue or green line, prompting you to rewrite it.
While this is helpful for students learning to write essays, it is incredibly intrusive for creative writers, novelists, or technical writers who are deliberately using specific sentence structures. Having a machine constantly critique your stylistic choices—and littering your screen with distracting colored underlines—can severely disrupt your creative flow.
You can easily disable the grammar and style checking engine, restricting Word to only checking for objective spelling errors (the red squiggly lines).
How to Turn Off Grammar and Style Checking
You can disable these advanced checks in the global Proofing options.
- Open your document in Microsoft Word.
- Click on File in the top-left corner of the ribbon.
- Click on Options at the bottom of the left sidebar.
- In the Word Options window, select Proofing from the left-hand navigation pane.
- Scroll down the right pane until you reach the section labeled When correcting spelling and grammar in Word.
- Uncheck the box labeled Mark grammar errors as you type.
- Uncheck the box labeled Check grammar with spelling.
- Click OK to save your changes.
Microsoft Word will instantly strip all blue and green squiggly lines from your document. The software will continue to flag blatantly misspelled words with red lines, but it will completely ignore your grammatical structure, allowing you to write in your own unique voice without interference.