Okay, some answers. Blocking large segments of text doesn't work because when you have to stop to make an edit, the block goes away.

I learned something I didn't know, however. If you place the cursor within the document and hit F7, spell/grammar check will take over FROM THAT POINT AND MOVE FORWARD. There seems to be some memory function at work, because you can close Word, reopen it, and it seems to remember that you told it to ignore previous fragments. I know at some point this stops working and it will ask you about the same fragments you already told it to ignore (in my defense, they are usually in quotations.)

So the answer I will use is to remember where I stopped checking on a given day, return to that point later, put the cursor in the document and proceed from there.