Then, next time you run spell check you will see this box afterwards with the readability stats at the bottom: In Word, go File > Options > Proofing, then under the When correcting spelling and grammar in Word heading tick the Show readability statistics box.
How to switch readability statistics on in Microsoft Word Let’s work our way through each of these in turn.
Only then will you really find out how ‘readable’ your document really is.Many companies and writers talk of the need for their communications to be written in plain English. Read it yourself, get someone in your target audience to read it, or get an editor to look it over. The cat sat on the mat makes sense to a human reader (of the English language) Cat mat the sat the on doesn’t make sense, yet they score exactly the same.ĭon’t rely on these scores to tell you how readable your document is. These indexes only look at word length, syllables, sentence length and the like - they don’t assess the order of the words that make up each sentence or the structure of your sentences and paragraphs. You could have written a 30,000 word thesis that gets a good ‘readability’ score with one of these indexes, yet it may be totally unreadable. While I’ve used a very simple example here, it’s enough to demonstrate why I’m loathe to take the so-called readability statistics at anything more than face value. or any other variation of these words - I get EXACTLY the same results! Yet I’ve gone from a comprehensible sentence to an incomprehensible one. Well, the problem is that if I change the words around in this sentence so that the sentence is incomprehensible - e.g. So far, so good - you might be wondering why I have a problem with this. If I run this same sentence through the web-based tool I mentioned earlier, I also get a good (though slightly different) result: Word’s Flesch Reading Ease score for this sentence is 100.0 and the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level is 0.0. If my sentence is The cat sat on the mat., I’m going to get a very good readability score. These scores look at the raw statistics but don’t seem able to comprehend the words and their order to see if the sentence actually makes sense to a human reader. They don’t address how ‘readable’ or understandable the sentence is either as a stand-alone sentence or in context with other sentences around it. The problem I have is that they only seem to take into account individual words in a sentence, the length of the sentence, and the syllables in the individual words. However, I have a big problem with these ‘scores’. The readability scores (and other statistics) are shown after spell check has finished. Select the Check grammar with spelling check box followed by the Show readability statistics check box, click OK. Word 2007: Microsoft Office button > Word Options button > Proofing.Word 2003: Tools > Spelling & Grammar tab, select the Check grammar with spelling check box followed by the Show readability statistics check box, click OK.Turn on the option to show the readability statistics:.
To check the readability or (US) grade level of your writing in Word:
Readability scores have been available in software such as Microsoft Word for years, and there are several free web-based tools available on the internet too (for example, ).