Readability stats - the results

[Sharon M.]

Hi all,

I've recently run Readability stats on a document to get an overall idea of
the language complexity. The results seem reasonable but there's one thing
that puzzles me:

The document is 20,495 words. The Readability window gives me a word count
of 358, characters 1639. I'm assuming, therefore, that these numbers
represent *only* the paragraphs flagged as "fragmented", "passive voice",
"long sentence", etc?

So, I guess all I need is either confirmation of the above assumption or ...
has the stats process gone wonky?

SM

 

[Pat Garard]

G'Day Sharon,

You may be interested in the (free) Word AddIn called Bullfighter....
http://www.fightthebull.com/bullfighter.asp

It has its amusing side, but the "Bull Index" delivers a solid assessment of
the document that includes the Flesch Score.

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

Was text selected when you generated the stats? If so, then it reported only
the count of the text that was selected. It should give you a count of the
entire document, otherwise, not just those sentences containing problems.

 

[Pat Garard]

G'Day (again) Sharon,

Of course I missed out my answer to the QUESTION.....

The statistics apply only to the most recent Language detected in the
document. For me, I have "English (Australian)" as my default Language,
but after (say) any copying and pasting, some sections of the Document
may be set to "English (US)" - and the stats apply only to the last Language
detected in the document.

You need to Select All, set the Language to your taste and run the stats
again. There may still be discrepancies owing to comments, text boxes,
text marked to be 'skipped' etc - see:
http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;292069&spid=2530&sid=763

 

[Sharon M.]

G'day Pat,

Hoorah ... someone from the same continent! I'm on Queensland's "Beautiful
one day, perfect the next" Sunshine Coast! ;-)

Yep, it's quite possible that the language is the culprit. My template is UK
(English) but who knows what others have been doing with the document. Thanks
for the hint ... I'll go back and check.

I'll have a look at the "fight the bull" thingy too! Thanks!

Sharon.

 

[Sharon M.]

Hiya Herb,

Nope, nothing selected. I went right to the beginning and ran the
readability test. (You'll recognize me from an earlier post to which you
replied.) Because I couldn't just run the stats I'd gone through the whole
document (p-a-i-n-f-u-l) stopping at each prompt and choosing "ignore rule"
or "ignore once" ... perhaps this was a daft thing to do????????????

Sharon.

 

[Herb Tyson [MVP]]

Just a thought, but if you don't really want the readability stats, but want
the word/character/line counts instead, you might consider Tools - Word
count instead of going the grammar route.