Any experienced patent prosecutor can tell you that there are words or phrases that shouldn’t be used (or should be used with extreme caution) in a patent application or Office Action response.  For example,  words to avoid include words connoting that some thing is mandatory (e.g., “all”, “necessary”, “required”, “need”), words connoting something is excluded (e.g., “only”, “consisting”), words with legal significance (e.g., “invention”, “prior art”)  or verbs such as “is”, “should”, and “are.”  Some patent attorneys may also add: “may” (instead of “can”) or vice versa, “Examiner”, or definite articles (e.g., “the”) instead of indefinite articles (e.g., “a”).

For more ideas and rational on potential patent profanity, see these Patently Defined blog postings (Post1 Post2) or these on the Anything Under the Sun Made By Man (Post1 Post2 Post3).

Regardless of the preferences of your company, your client, your partner, or you with regards to what constitutes patent profanity, the exclude dictionary (”exclusion dictionary” in Office 2007) feature of Microsoft Office can help you identify where these words are used in your document so you can reduce or eliminate their use.

Words contained within the exclude dictionary are marked as though they are misspelled even though the word is in the standard spell checking dictionary.

The exclude dictionary is a special text file.  Words are entered in the text file in all lowercase letters with ENTER pressed after each word.

For Office 2000, 2002, and 2003, the file must be named Mssp3en.exc for American English and this file does not exist by default.  It should be saved at C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Microsoft\Proof.

For Office 2007, the exclusion dictionary file, which exists by default, is named ExcludeDictionaryEN0409.lex for American English.  On Vista, the file is located at C:\Users\user name\AppData\Microsoft\UProof and on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is located at C:\Documents and Settings\user name\Application Data\Microsoft\UProof.

Keep in mind that this isn’t only useful for documents that you are drafting.  It is also useful when you are reviewing a more junior patent attorney/agent’s work or reviewing a patent for due diligence or invalidity/non-infringement purposes — after copying the text into Microsoft Word.

To get you started, an example exclude dictionary for American English for Office 2002/2003, including words that may not be patent profanity but are included for other reasons discussed tomorrow, is available here.  After downloading (and optionally customizing it in your favorite text editor), place it in the appropriate directory discussed above and restart Office.