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applied tips : april 2007
microsoft word : is your memo too wordy?
Do you have a tendency to use awkwardly cumbersome or unnecessarily enormous words when you compose a memorandum?
Are your sentences so long that people sometimes forget what you are writing about by the time they get to the end of your very long and convoluted descriptions of exceedingly intricate subject matter?
Is your writing so advanced that only University of the Pacific doctoral students can decipher it?
It's important to step back and make sure people will understand what you're saying. To assist in that process, Microsoft Word offers a handy Readability Statistics tool that helps you assess the readability of your writing.
Readability Statistics
You're probably already used to checking your documents for spelling and grammar errors before sending them out. But another important step to your review process is to run the Readability Statistics feature.
Readability Statistics include totals for the number of words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs in the document, as well as average sentences per paragraph, words per sentence, and characters per word.
Most useful, however, are the readability indicators, including the percentage of passive sentences, Flesch Reading Ease score, and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score.
In this issue we'll talk about how to display these metrics and also explain what they mean.
To display readability statistics
The readability statistics are provided in conjunction with the spell check function. To turn the feature on in Word 97 - 2003, select Tools > Options from the menu, click the Spelling and Grammar tab, and check the "Show readability statistics" check box.
To use the feature, select Tools > Spelling and Grammar from the menu and proceed through checking the spelling of your document. When you reach the end of spell checking, the Readability Statistics dialog box appears automatically, displaying all the counts, averages and readability statistics.
Here you can study the results and continue revising your document until the statistics meet your standards.
What's a Flesch score anyway?
The first two sections of the Readability Statistics dialog box—Counts and Averages—are pretty self-explanatory. The Readability section requires a little more study.
Passive Sentences — Tells you the percentage of your sentences that are written in the passive voice.
As you may recall from English class, in the active voice action goes from the subject to the receiver. For example: "A dog bit him."
In passive voice, the subject becomes the receiver. For example: "He was bitten by a dog." Sometimes the doer isn't named, as in: "He was bitten."
While there is nothing really incorrect about passive sentences, writing in the active voice can add more zest to your writing.
Flesch Reading Ease score — Rates text on a 100-point scale. The higher the score, the easier it is to understand the text.
Microsoft Word Help files recommend aiming for a score of 60-70 for most documents. This score is calculated using a formula that considers the average number of syllables per word and words per sentence.
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score — Rates text on a U.S. school grade level. For example, a score of 6.0 means that a sixth-grader can understand the writing.
You probably want to try for a score of 7.0 - 8.0 for most standard documents, but that could differ depending on your audience. This score is also calculated using a formula that considers the average number of syllables per word and words per sentence.
Use some common sense
One thing to keep in mind is that the Readability Statistics are only a guideline.
Often you may prepare memos or technical documents that purposely contain bulleted sentence fragments, lists or tables of technical words, or other unconventional material.
In these cases the Readability Statistics may be skewed. Make sure to use them as a tool to enhance your normal reviewing procedures, but don't be a prisoner to them if they don't make sense in certain situations.
Sprechen Sie Deutsch?
A final interesting feature to note about the Readability Statistics is that they can work for multiple languages. If you have set up Word to check the spelling of other languages, you can use the Readability Statistics for these languages as well.
If you are working with more than one language in a single document, Word shows the readability statistics for the last language that was checked. For example, if you are writing a document in German, French, and English, and the last paragraph is in English, Word displays the readability for the English paragraph only.
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quick reference card
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