Free! Improved! Must Have!
I love hype. But the following three tools and techniques actually meet those expectations. You already own these tools, you just have to put them to use.
Creative Find and Replace
You might already use the ‘regular’ find and replace. In MS Word, it’s in the <edit> menu under replace. The short-cut keys are <ctrl> + <H>. It’s handy when you want to change all the occurrences of a character’s name or a company name that you misspelled.
I wrote a how-to article recently on a magic trick that used ‘right ‘ and ‘left’ over and over throughout the piece. Brain fog arose and I switched around every use of the two terms. I couldn’t just find all the lefts and change them to rights, because then MS Word wouldn’t be able to distinguish which of the rights (the new or the old) had to be then changed to lefts. (This is awfully confusing to even write about now.)
The solution and more
The key insight was to first change all the lefts to a nonsense word- lzft- and then change the rights to lefts and then change the nonsense word to right. But there’s more! In the middle of this, I happened to run a spell check. All the ‘lzft’s showed up. Aha! I could use find and replace to hunt for style errors.
Do you suffer from too many that’s? Or maybe his brother, which, plagues you. Just do a find and replace to make all the thats into thzts. Run spell check and you can look at every use and decide to cut or keep as you see fit. I’ve used the same technique to search my writing for ly. I was overusing adverbs. Suddenly, importantly and other lys infested the page like some medieval disease. I changed them all to lz and then ran spell check to edit.
The real beauty here is that with just a few find-replace + spell check cycles, you will learn to instinctively spot and fix your own gremlins as you write. Just doing it a few times will lock in any style or grammar error you need to pay special attention to.
F7- Your new best friend
In MS Word, F7 brings up spell check. But there is a hidden feature you should know and use. Navigate through tools - options - spelling and grammar and check the box near the bottom for Show readability statistics. Click ok.
You’ve now supercharged F7. When you hit it now, it will do the regular spelling and grammar checks and then bring up your readability statistics. I won’t get into the details of what each entry means, but here are the levels you want to hit-
- words per sentence (avg)- max of 15
- characters per word (avg)- around 4.5
- passive voice- less than 10%
- Flesch Reading Ease - higher than 70% ; shoot for 80% or more.
- Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level - 6 maximum, less than 5 ideal.
Just to show you what I mean, this article (so far) rates at a Reading Ease of 85.1 and a Grade Level of 4.2- not bad. Use this unbiased editor to your advantage and the F7 key will soon be as worn as the delete key is now.
Innocent eyes
When you think your piece is ready; after you’ve spell checked, edited, and tweaked- find some innocent eyes. Anyone who isn’t a writer will do. Hand them a copy of your article and a highlighter. Ask them to read it over and just mark any spots in the text that seem at all awkward. You don’t need any comments from them, you just need to know where they get confused or off-track.
With the marked-up piece in hand, set aside your ego and look hard at any places they pointed out. Fix them. Slice and dice your purple prose if you need to and remember that you are above all trying to communicate. Innocent eyes will tell you if you have done your job well enough.
Practice these techniques and I think you will find your writing will improve dramatically.
Boy am I out of line on these stats
Way out of line. I seem to do fine with the first three categories but not so hot when it comes to the last three 
Turns out I’m someplace between Reader’s Digest and Time Magazine
Wikipedia says: Reader’s Digest magazine has a readability index of about 65, Time magazine scores about 52, and the Harvard Law Review has a general readability score in the low 30s. The highest (easiest) readability score possible is 121 (every sentence consisting of a one-syllable word)
Doreen, as you can imagine, readability indexes can be drawn from different stats. Word length, sentence length and structure, as well as paragraph construction may all figure in to varying degrees. The one available in MS word has been compared across genres. Since this is the one most convenient for me to use, I track my stuff on their scale. On this scale your average best selling novel rates at a grade level of about 4.3 and, depending on how fast a scene is ‘moving’, from 70 to 90% reading ease.
An experiment you can do- download or type in material you like that reads slick and easy, and then, when it is in MS word format, do the reading stats on it. I might recommend Dave’s work, here at the blog, as I find him a particularly smooth writer.