How to check readability in Microsoft Word and why the score lies to you

Microsoft Word has had a built-in readability checker since the 1990s, hidden behind a tick box that almost no one finds by accident. Once you switch it on, every spell check ends with a small dialog showing the Flesch reading ease and Flesch-Kincaid grade level of your document. This guide is how to turn it on, what the numbers actually mean and the four common ways it gets the wrong answer.

Where is the readability score in Microsoft Word?

Word’s readability checker is switched off by default. Turn it on under File > Options > Proofing and tick the box labelled Show readability statistics. The score only appears after Word has finished a full spelling and grammar check on the document.

Step-by-step instructions

1. Open the Word document you want to check.
2. Click File, then Options, then Proofing.
3. Under When correcting spelling and grammar in Word, tick both Check grammar with spelling and Show readability statistics.
4. Click OK to save.
5. Press F7 or click Spelling and Grammar on the Review tab.
6. Work through any spelling and grammar prompts. When the check finishes, the readability statistics dialog appears automatically.

The dialog stays open until you dismiss it. There is no menu shortcut that takes you straight to the score. The spell check is the only door in.

What numbers does Word show?

The dialog has three sections.

Counts: total words, characters, paragraphs and sentences in the document. Useful as a sanity check before you submit anything with a word-count limit.

Averages: sentences per paragraph, words per sentence and characters per word. These are the raw inputs to the formulas underneath, which makes them more useful than they look. If your characters-per-word is above 5.5 your Flesch score will struggle. If your words-per-sentence is above 20 the same applies.

Readability: Flesch reading ease and Flesch-Kincaid grade level. Word also shows the percentage of passive sentences, which is a separate signal worth tracking.

Flesch reading ease is the headline number for most people. Aim for 60 or above on a public-facing document. Flesch-Kincaid grade level, expressed as a US school grade, should sit below 9 for general adult audiences.

Why does Word show different readability scores than other tools?

Word uses a simple syllable counter that miscounts common abbreviations, brand names and UK English spellings. It also rounds sentence and word counts differently from web tools such as readable.com. The result is that the same document can score 65 in Word and 60 in a web tool. Both are right by their own rules.

There are four specific traps worth knowing about.

Trap one: Word counts headings as sentences

Word treats a heading without a full stop as a sentence. Add headings to a document and your average words per sentence drops, which lifts the Flesch score artificially. If you are reporting a score for a finished web page, paste the body text only into a fresh document before you run the check.

Trap two: Word rounds bullet points oddly

A bulleted list of short fragments (“first item”, “second item”, “third item”) will inflate your readability score because each bullet counts as a one-word “sentence”. This is fine when you want a high score for free. It is misleading when you actually want to know how the prose reads.

Trap three: brand names crash the syllable counter

Word’s syllable counter does not know how to pronounce “TripAdvisor” or “WordPress”. It guesses from letter patterns and usually gets it wrong by a syllable or two. One or two brand names in a document does not matter. A document about WordPress that uses the word “WordPress” 40 times will read as harder than it is.

Trap four: small samples lie

Word will happily score a one-paragraph document with the same precision as a 10,000-word document. The formulas were designed for samples of at least 100 words. Anything shorter is a sketch of a score, not a real one.

Can I run Word’s readability check on selected text only?

No. Word always scores the whole document. The workaround is to copy the text you want to score into a brand-new blank document, run the check there and close the new document without saving.

This is the same trick you use to score a single blog post when your manuscript is a hundred-page book. The numbers always apply to whatever Word currently considers “the document”, so isolating a section in a fresh window is the cleanest way to get an honest score for it.

How does Word’s readability check compare to web tools?

Web tools tend to be stricter than Word on the same text. There are two reasons for that.

Web tools usually run more than one formula in parallel (Flesch, Gunning fog, Dale-Chall, SMOG) and surface the worst result. Word only shows Flesch.

Web tools also flag specific sentences and words as hard. Word only gives you the aggregate. That makes web tools better for editing and Word better for a final sanity check.

The two complement each other. Draft in Word, run a quick Flesch check there, then paste into readable.com or hemingwayapp.com for sentence-level feedback before publishing.

What to do when the score will not move

You will sometimes hit a wall. The topic genuinely needs hard words. The structure cannot be simplified any further. The score still says “very difficult”. This happens most often with legal or medical or financial content, where the precise word is the whole point.

The honest answer is that the score has done its job. It has told you that your readers are going to hit friction. From there you have two real options.

You can leave the writing as it is and accept that some readers will drop off. That is the right call for specialist audiences who already know the vocabulary.

Or you can leave the writing as it is and give every reader a way out of the hard words. WP AI Explainer lets any reader highlight a hard word on a WordPress page and see a plain-English explanation inline. The Flesch score does not change. Comprehension does, because readers can resolve unfamiliar words on demand instead of leaving.

Switch on Word’s readability check today

Five minutes of setup gives you a score on every document you proof in Word from now on. Pair it with a web tool for sentence-level feedback and install WP AI Explainer so your readers get the same help once the writing is live.

Frequently asked questions

Where is the readability score in Microsoft Word?

Go to File > Options > Proofing, tick “Show readability statistics” and run a spell check (F7). The score appears in a dialog when the check finishes.

Why does Word show different readability scores than other tools?

Word uses a simple syllable counter that miscounts common abbreviations, brand names and UK English spellings. It also rounds sentence and word counts differently from web tools.

Can I run Word’s readability check on selected text only?

No. Word always scores the whole document. Workaround: copy the text into a new document, run the check and close the new document without saving.