Abstract: In an electronic word processing system environment, a system and method for verifying the accuracy of the grammatical composition of a sentence and the spelling of words within the sentence in an electronic document. A sentence is extracted from the electronic document. It is determined whether any of the words in the sentence are misspelled. If any of the words are misspelled, then an indication is displayed in a combined spelling and grammar dialog box. Determination is made whether the sentence is of proper grammatical composition. If the sentence does not have proper grammatical composition, then an indication is displayed in the combined spelling and grammar dialog box. These tasks may be repeated for each sentence in the document until the entire document has been proofed.