Show Document Readability Statistics

Summary: Microsoft Word 2003 can provide rough estimates on how easy your document is to read.

Creating a Microsoft Word 2003 document for a particular audience and worried that your writing may be too convoluted? Perhaps your document has too many passive sentences or was written for too high a grade level?

Yep, another passive sentence…

The following tweak for Word 2003 displays a dialog box after you perform a manual grammar check with “Tools” – “Spelling and Grammar” (or pressing F7). Note that you do not have to select the entire document before performing this check.

1. Select “Tools” – “Options”.

2. When the “Options” multi-tabbed dialog box appears click the “Spelling & Grammar” tab.

3. Underneath “Grammar”, check “Show readability statistics”

4. Click “OK” to close the dialog box.

After performing a manual grammar check a dialog box appears similar to the following:

Sample Word 2003 document readability statistics