Among the array of tech tools that we editors can use to ease the cognitive load, Google Docs stands out as a free option. Although it appears similar to the MS Word spelling and grammar checks (renamed ‘Editor’ in recent versions/updates), we have noticed that it picks up things which Word doesn’t (the opposite is also true, so think of them as complementary, not competing, tools). In this blog, we explain how to use this free tool and present a few examples of errors and suggested fixes we’ve collected.

How to do it and what you need

Getting started – the absolute basics

You will need a Google account, which will give you access to Google Drive and Google Docs. If you have a Gmail address, you should already have access to the rest of the Google services.

Start by heading to https://drive.google.com/ and then clicking the ‘New+’ button at the top left. Depending on your workflow, either upload an existing file or create a new Google Doc and type or paste your content into the blank document.

You may like to run a few checks before you start working on a document (to catch glaring errors so that you don’t have to find them) and then again once you’ve finished (to catch residual errors or – heaven forbid – any errors you may have introduced).

You can either make the edits online in Google Docs itself, or use the tool simply to identify errors and then make the corrections manually in your original document.

A note on data privacy and protection

• Always ask your client for permission to upload their work to a cloud service, especially if you have a personal (non-enterprise) Google account.
• You may also wish to anonymise the document and remove any sensitive information before uploading it to Google Docs.

Setting your language and running the checker

You can change the language variant (UK, US and Canadian are the options available currently for English) via the File > Language menu.

And now to check your document. You can scroll through your document and scan for words with squiggly underlines, but we have found that running the checker is more convenient, especially when working on a long document.

From the Tools menu, select Spelling and grammar > Spelling and grammar check.

The document will jump to the first ‘error’ that Google Docs identifies, and you’ll be presented with a suggestion at the top right of the screen. That dialog box is fairly self-explanatory: accept the suggestion (if you are making the edits directly in Google Docs), ignore the ‘error’ or choose from multiple suggestions. If you click the ‘kebab’ menu (three stacked dots), you have the option of accepting or ignoring all occurrences (however, as with any bulk find-and-replace tool, use at your own risk), or adding an unrecognised word to your personal dictionary.

Examples of what it catches

Let’s start with the obvious: just plain wrong!

Okay, ‘gooder’ was just too easy. What else can it do?

Spellcheck evaders (using intelligence or context to determine that they are wrong)

• Incomplete words (example: an → and)
• ‘as made’ → ‘has made’

• embers → members

• Homophones (whether/weather)

• Similar/Confused words (pressurised, devaluated – depending on who you ask, yes, these are both legitimate words)

Incorrect word usage

• For example, ‘that’ versus ‘which’

Missing words

• For example, the missing article ‘a’

Punctuation

• Incorrect use of commas

• It even picks up mismatched single and double opening/closing quotes.
• Punctuation (it also suggested a full stop after ‘people’); in this case, stet, as it was quoted material, done for effect.

This could be the correct form – possessive – but not in this case; it was supposed to be a plural, therefore without an apostrophe.

Real-world terms and proper nouns

The checker picked up that this might be ‘Federation’ – which is the name of the body.

It also checks foreign-language words (in this case, the name of an academic journal).

This spelling variation was more obvious in the TOC, but these headings were scattered throughout the document and might otherwise have been missed.

Grammar

• Concord error

• Checks for and corrects parallel structure

• Word forms

• Singular/Plural

The original was simply ‘newspapers’; ‘stories’ was added, but ‘newspaper’ was overlooked. This saved the editor from introducing an error.

Repeated words

• Google Docs suggested ‘from’ in the place of the first ‘what’ (this was quoted text and therefore could not be changed; the authors noted elsewhere that it was probably an error and suggested ‘from’ as a correction).

• ‘came in’ in this case meant ‘emerged’ or ‘was introduced’, therefore the second ‘in’ was necessary. This was a good reminder to use a synonym to get rid of the avoidable repetition.

One more tool in your editing toolbox

Of course, not all of Google’s suggestions are correct or useful. It still takes a trained editor to accept or reject the suggestion (or do something entirely different). Nevertheless, taking a few minutes to run your document through this process may save you time elsewhere and help you to catch embarrassing errors before you return the document to your client.

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