Use Microsoft Word to improve writing in 2 easy steps

Most of you use Microsoft Word to do a spell check and grammar check. How many of you use it to do a readability test? Very few.

Reason: Most of us are not even aware of such an awesome service that resides on our laptop.

All that you need to do is to activate the Readability function of your Microsoft Word. After that, every time you write you will know how readable your article is.

Here is how you activate the Readability function on Microsoft Word.

Step 1
Open the Word file and click on the Office button. The drop down menu at the base has a button: Word Options. Click on Word Options.

Step 2
The screen that will open has a Menu command Proofing. Please click on it. It will open another screen where there is a section titled: When correcting spelling and grammar in Word. Among the commands in this section are: Show Readability Statistics. Check this box, and Save.

Your Readability function in Microsoft Word is now active.

Now when you do a spell check the Word will automatically do a Readability Check, and display the findings as Readability Statistics:

Now, what you need to do:

Check the word count; reduce the word length if it is more than 400 words. The ideal word count for web is between 300 to 400 words.

Check the average number of words per sentence: it should be less than 20.

Check the average number of sentences per paragraph: it should be two or three at most. Break the paragraph if the number of sentences is more than three.

Check the percentage of passive sentences: it should be as low as possible.

Check the Flesch Reading Ease Score: it should be over 60 for good readability.

Rewrite the article if your results show wide variance. More people will read your article if the readability score is over 60.