Hi Dark,
Since you are a native speaker of English, I don't know really why would you need the spellcheck provided that you own the four features of language; reading, writing, listening, and speaking. I am not a native English speaker, and I never use the spellcheck feature in any document processing application. My suggestion is to avoid it as much as possible, since you are really hiding your mistakes from yourself. It is better to stop and check the spelling of certain words whose correct spelling you're not sure about, rather than let Microsoft word do the job for you. I tell this to all those who care about their writing skills, cause one of the skills is having a good level of writing your language, and this is completely different from speaking where you simply pronounce the word you heard somewhere.

Well, I guess you are aware of what you write, so that, for example, you won't mistake peace for piece. I am certainly talking about documents that you write, not documents written by others.

@Afrim, firstly, what about typos? Really as Cae and Nocturnus both said just because a person is a native speaker does not mean they don't need a spell check, especially I might say when using a screen reader and being liable to do things like miss extra spaces, change capitalisation  or have floating punctuation marks, or indeed write a word which sounds! perfectly fine  is usually spelt in an absolutely irrational way.

While I love the English language for it's depth of expression  and endless nuances, I hate! it's illogical spelling.

I am naturally a person who writes by sound and rhythm, the spelling of many English words is frankly irrational to me.
So, when I am writing, especially creatively as I do with  pieces of serious work like my book reviews (and expecially academic things), I'm far more concerned with how things sound! than the stupidity of spelling, indeed my research assistant (who has a masters in English language), once told me my spelling is always correct, it is just not always right .
This is why I use a spellcheck, which indeed often does tell me about the more eccentric turns of English spelling.

What I do not! like is word's habbit of telling me what to write, so if anyone has a solution for that that would be much appreciated.

I always have trouble with IPHone for some odd reason, along with the word just jsut because my brain is a lot faster than my fingers, and once upon a time I went to the run dialogue intending to type downloads and ended up with d[wm;pads, whatever those are.  so yes, spellcherkers... I mean, spelchekkers, they really do have a purpose in life.  We're only as goood as the computers we work with, and that's why spellcheckers exist.
BTW, the above parragraph is proof that just because you know precisely what you want to say and how you want to say it, you won't always write it right, especially if you type some 70 words per minute and your fingers can't keep up with your thoughts.

hi,
Dark, I agree with you 100%. When writing academic papers, it is sometimes necesary to use many words. I also find the problem you're facing in word. I just ignore each time. However, you might go to file/options and under the proofing catagory, uncheck check for style. That should probably  fix that. In fact, I'll try it after writing this post and report back, as word always tries to correct me when I write "I am of the opinion that".

@Enes, You are exactly right. Having written  and read papers on ethics for years, I am used to the different nuances implicit in sentence structure, for example as I said above saying two things are "the same" is  not functionally equivalent to saying "two things are exactly the same" whatever word thinks, since the qualifier "exactly" denotes a  level of emphasis that the simple bare bones statement of similarity does not.

This is why I tend to work hard with what I want to say when I write book reviews, ---- which you can find over at www.fantasybookreview.co.uk, (the last one they posted was for Anne McCaffrey's Dragon flight, but I've just sent off two new ones).

Either way thanks for finding the grammar settings. I was sure they were there somewhere, but with  the annoying ribbons I wasn't exactly sure where Word's options were, (older versions of Word used to have spell check options available when you actually ran the spell check).

It turns out that the setting which was causing the problem was "clarity and conciseness" (wordiness was unchecked by default but once I unchecked the clarity setting Word stopped flagging qualifiers).

@Tjt, Thanks for the writing guide I'll have a look at that, it'll likely give me a chuckle.

I'm afraid though I simply disagree with you about Word's concise choices here.

The actual sentence with "a number of" was where I was describing the protagonist of the horror novel I was reviewing having "a number of" nightmares in the book. I do not  remember how many there were, certainly not enough to call "many"

"several" might have done, however I wanted to denote the fact that the nightmares were a recurring theme, particularly since I was  contrasting the nightmares to other themes in the bbook itself.

Btw, the book in question was Bentley Little's "the Influence"

of course your quite free to disagree with my use of qualifyers here, however like me you are a rational person who can hear and understand the nuances of language, not a computer program telling me how to write based  on an algorithm! Hell the very idea of such I find rather disturbing, since hay what ever happened  to the idea of writing creatively?

I demand my right to waffle! .

@Tjt, that is exactly my point. I! wanted to use the phrase "a number of" because  believed it to be correct given the context of what I  writing about. You would have used a different phrase, which is  course as it should be since you are a different person.

Even if you and I both wrote reviews of the same book, and even if we both agreed, not just what we say, but the way we say it would be individualised. that is the thing I find so offensive in Word,  in the guise of @conciseness@ it is actually smothering people's creative use of language.

Btw, in terms of The Influence, hopefully my review will be posted soon and you can see yourself what I thought of the book.
It wasn't a bad book, the actual horror stuff was very well done, though some of the characters and the author's pacing were rather off.Find all my book reviews here

"Afrim, while I admit I rather toss off posts on this forum, when writing something serious like my academic work or book reviews I already proof read exhaustively, iondeed I frequently have double spaces because I have changed words several times,  and as you probably have noticed I do tend to use British English spelling.

I do find the ability to instantly know of a spelling error helpful, but effectively as Tjt said that is using the word spellcheck anyway, so using the spell check afterwards is simply an extra way of checking.

Again, I'm really not sure why you have this downer on a spellcheck (especially when you admit you use  the function to flag spelling errors individually and have your screen reader announce them).

"Tjt I agree completely, the sad thing is if  Dickins had been checked for conciseness methinks his books wouldn't be half what they were.

"Afrim, I'm afraid I really don't see the difference here. While you are writing you use the spellcheck to flag your errors and lookup words your uncertain of, but you don't use the checking tool after you have finished writing? Quite aside from catching  things like extra spaces, this seems a little odd to me.
maybe it is a difference in how we right. Myself, I tend to splurge completely, slashing down words in something of a frenzy much as the way I would speak them. Then when I either finish what I am doing or come to a stopping point I go back to the top and read through, and check, then check again, and usually a few more times, making miner edits in sentence structure and sometimes even paragraph order to make my text readable. My  thesis I literally read through line by line close to 100 times making incredibly! small changes.  if I get a buzz and a spelling error I'll try to correct at this point, though generally I don't regard spellings as a priority until I have actually finished the work on the content, since it is more important to me that I get across what I want to say in the way I want to say it than that every spelling is letter perfect at this stage.
Only when this process of checking and rechecking is completely over do I run the spellcheck to catch things that my editing with a screen reader misses as any spelling errors I didn't edit out, miss placed spaces, floating punctuation etc.

Btw this actually used to create major arguments when I was writing for my degree,  I was always told to write @ an essay plan or a draught.
I however never! wrote draughts or plans, since what I wrote  was a much less structured and more organic process where I'd have a clear idea of what I was going! to say just not necessarily how I was going to say it, or a specifically defined structure of points I could rigidly adhere to since my points usually immerged as I went through the checking and rechecking process.

@Dark, Well, as I said, it is a little bit different as I stop whenever I am not sure whether different, for example, is written with a double F, or with a single F. Sometimes Word corrects them automatically, particularly when the misspelling is a mistake like S for C, S for Z, and vice-versa. However, in most of the cases I don't need to have Word do that for me, since my memory still works well, but it does seldom fall into a big confusion. The reason I don't do spellchecking is because I've been taught to take writing and language in particular, very seriously. I study English language and culture, and throughout my experience with English, we've had different classes with different activities which tend to improve our spelling. We've had dictations each week three years ago, and that really had a positive effect in the quality of my written English since I could see my mistakes and correct them. My teacher of English was very helpful in working with me as well. She would encourage me to work harder everyday, and this is the reason why I was one of the best students in my class, and even my school. Studying English, after getting a degree, we are supposed to be teacher of English, and if we pursue further studies we are supposed to be professors of English, in that we can work in higher posts like pedagogs, professional translators, editors or redactors for publishing houses, book writers, and so on. Suppose that you were a professor of English tomorrow, what would you do? Would you use spellchecking to identify the mistakes of your students? Yes? ok than, its the computer working, not you.

@Enes, what do you study, please?

hi,
At afrim, I am currently doing my BA in ELT. But what wait? Wern't you studying linguistics? I am also seriously considering  further graduate study in linguistics.
Dark, a minor correction. I was born and raised in the US, though my parents are both Turkish. So, according to linguistics, I qualify as a native speaker of english, as I spent almost 8 years in the US.
I should further say that I fully believe that a spellcheck is a definite must when writing anything important, such as academic work. As english is not an orthographic language, it is natural to sometimes, even frequently misspell some words.

@Harley B, Enes found a way to disabled the annoying thing, check posts 12 and 13 in this topic. Now the spellcheck in word is fine.

What is grammarly?

Well since I've already bought word I don't really see the point of another paid service, as word is working fine now.