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Using Word’s built-in editing statistics to write more readable articles
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May 6, 2025
A quick look at using Microsoft Word's built-in editing statistics, particularly the Grade Level number, to write more readable articles—with a quick word on how they actually work. There is no Mopar content here!
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readability is very important and by
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readability I mean how easy something is
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to read and there are measures that you
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can find in Microsoft Word which will
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tell you how easy something is to read
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it's a grade level equivalent so if you
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score 12 that means that something can
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be read easily by somebody who has
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finished 12th grade let's take a closer
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look on how you can find these numbers
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so here we're in a word file and we're
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looking at the beginning of a paper
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called immigrant healthcare access and
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the affordable care act which we found
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on Jtore and if we want to find out how
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easy this is to read in an objective way
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and keeping in mind that anytime that
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you measure ease of reading it's going
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to be an approximation word gives us a
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pretty fast and efficient way of getting
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an objective if not 100% valid measure
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of how easy this is to read the way that
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I would normally do it being a longtime
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Mac person is by going to tools say
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spelling and grammar click on editor and
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here it is and the one I'm interested in
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is document
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stats and here we see the reading ease
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is 18.8 which is fairly low and the
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fleshkade grade level is
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17.3 and these are very different
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measures but they're basically based on
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how long the words and the paragraphs
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and the sentences are and you can do
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this for an entire document or you can
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just select part of it as you saw I
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selected part of this file because I'm
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not interested in the names and the
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title and what this number means is this
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is the approximate grade level that this
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is written for so this would be
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comfortable for somebody who's finished
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17th grade in the US you graduate high
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school in 12th grade so that would mean
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13 14 15 16 would be a bachelor's degree
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and 17th grade would be somewhere in
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your master's degree so let's take a
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look at another one this is a book
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written for normal people uh it's just
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part of it we'll just select parts of
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two paragraphs here and this time I'm
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going to look at how you would do this
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from Windows you click on review click
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on editor and here it is now here the
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reading ease has gone up and the grade
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level has gone down so the grade level
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is now somewhere above high school so
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how can we fix that well uh the main way
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to fix that to make it easier to read is
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to go through and to look for long words
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and to look for long sentences so uh
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Olds was reportedly not easy to work
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with let's say that he
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was said to be hard to work with which
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is also
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[Music]
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true and we can say which is why two
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engineers left holds and let's see what
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is a small runabout is really a small
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open
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car which
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was quiet because
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of
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its had a clever flywheel mounted fan to
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drive air under the car all right so now
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let's see what we get under stats and
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now it's down to 12 so now we're at high
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school level which is much better than
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being
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12.7 now let's look at something that's
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in between and we have a draft of a
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paper that students are working on and
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this would be aimed at people who
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already have a master's degree or
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doctorate so we would expect it to be
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harder to read let's take a look and
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we'll go back to review editor see
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there's
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editor and here we have a grade level of
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16 and a lower reading
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ease so uh let's take a look and see
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what we can do to make this better uh
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mental health requirements I think
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issues is better instead of 10 are
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likely tend to have layered barriers
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uh several barriers to
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care uh let's
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see and
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found and then we can split this uh
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sentence up
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here especially true for those with
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psychological distress burns are only
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predicted limited access okay
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and we should say that we're summarizing
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by saying in short being an
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immigrant causes a level of appears to
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cause sorry we don't want to say it
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definitely causes because we didn't
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really found out and let's see instead
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of compound let's say
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[Music]
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worsen and you can say this replies to
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the inequality so we're making the uh
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words shorter and we are
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making the sentences uh
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shorter we shouldn't have contractions
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like
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don't likened i don't know what this
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means by likened uh what um I think that
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they meant studied and we don't really
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have to get into exactly who they
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studied here people can look that
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up less inclined or less likely to
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face but both and
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non-Daka people still
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had financial issues with
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care the work shows is always better
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than illustrates when it can be used
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that while
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policy can reduce some forms of equality
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more far-reaching reform is needed to
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fully enable immigrant health
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care let's say access
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to all right so now let's see how we do
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i think it was just these two paragraphs
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i hope it
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was now we're down to 14.2 and the
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reading ease is higher so that's good
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and we could keep on going uh for
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example partial legal
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protections such as
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DACA did that make any difference that
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made it worse uh we can also do the
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entire document which is 12 pages long
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and as you can see it comes out very
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quickly and it's got a reasonable grade
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level even if you can read something
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more complex and harder to read it
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doesn't mean that you want to and in
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some cases you really want a much lower
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grade level because you want something
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to be easy and pleasant to read and
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things are easier and pleasant more
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pleasant to read generally when they're
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in the high school range because then
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the sentences can be long and
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complicated enough to be interesting but
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on the other hand you're not making it a
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pain to parse each sentence to
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understand what people are saying anyway
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that's the tool and some ways to use the
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tool and I hope that you'll find other
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useful things in my
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