Hidden Gems in the Grammar Checker
By Jane Penson

Some of the grammar checker's comments are quite annoying. For example, what use is it to know that you have used the passive, if there is no explanation of what the passive is and why you should not use it? Still, there are some surprisingly useful tools in there - here is an example:

Go into the grammar checker's toolkit and tick the box called "readability statistics", which is not ticked by default. Here's how:

Word 97-2003

Tools/options/spelling & grammar gives you a page of tick boxes. Readability statistics is the last one.

Word 2007

Click on the office button; go to "Word Options" right down at the bottom of the box; click on "proofing" third down on the left; readability statistics is three-quarters of the way down the page.

Now, after you run the spellchecker right through your document you will find some gems. The first one is that you find out your average sentence length, which is quite useful (anything over 20 words is hard to read).

The real surprise to me though was the Flesch reading ease index. A client of mine encouraged me to look into it - so I discovered its value. If you check it out in Wikipedia you get the full explanation, but the short version is that a high score is easier to read than a low score - and it really works. An article from the Sun (UK newspaper with a broad public audience) got 62, the Financial Times (targeted at business leaders) and the Independent (for an educated general audience) both got scores in the high 40s, a poorly written report got 34 and some particularly long-winded, indecipherable text in a random website got no points at all.

In other words, it can be a genuine indicator of how accessible your writing is. Personally, I think reports should be in the high 40s and web content should be higher. If you play with a well-written few texts that you are familiar with, you can make a good judgement about the score you should be aiming for.

This article gets 66.4.

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