EAS read is something that's also very much on our mind as writers, you may or may not be aware of the special feature available in Microsoft Word called flesh Kincaid readability statistics. To access this, head on over to your file menu and scroll down to the bottom for options. When the word options box displays, you're going to look for proofing and then scroll down just a bit we're looking for the when correcting spelling and grammar section. And earlier when we were doing our spell check lesson we learned about the check spelling and grammar as we type but this is going to be a checkbox we enable called show readability statistics. And you may want to have it look at grammar and or perhaps grammar and other refinements. You can see what those other elements are by clicking The settings feature there and scrolling down through the list.

So there are all sorts of items that you could add into this spec things that Grammarly might have been helping you with in a paid version of their software that you can do for free right here in Microsoft Word. So select any that are of interest to you for your next spellcheck. But in terms of readability statistics, all you need to do is click the box and then recheck your document so that it will go back through from scratch, and click OK. Now, when we run our spellcheck this next time and complete the spelling and grammar fixes, it will bring up our readability statistics box where you can note not only the word and character page count and sentence count for your book, or manuscript blog, perhaps, but also the average number of sentences per paragraph original number of words per sentence, and average number of characters per word.

But the part we're really looking for is here at the bottom are readability stats. So we'll need a little bit of interpretation here for this first number. Flesch reading ease is weighing in at 63.6. Now this is not a grade that you're looking for on a 100 count like exam that you might have had for school to determine the grade level, they've showed this as a 6.9. So in theory, somewhere between sixth and seventh grade, perhaps, right toward the end of that school year, but if you take your number from the Flesch reading, ease and pop over to Wikipedia, you can just search for flesh Kincaid readability and get to this page. Then scroll down to the Flesch reading ease scale.

And you'll see that that number between 60 and 70 indicates the writing wave In between eighth and ninth grade, written in plain English, and easily understood by 13 to 15 year old students and folks older than that. So if you're looking for a particular age group that you're writing for, you may and middle grade readers want to weigh in much closer to that 90 to 100 score. Or if you're writing for an academic audience, then your work could be even lower on that East score. Just always be cognizant that clarity and elegance of writing is also important, not just obfuscation of text. Okay, so, I hope this has helped you determine a little bit about the ease of read and the grade level of your document as an added feature for Microsoft Word.