Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Office 365. If you are using an earlier version (Word 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Word, click here: Finding Long Sentences.
Bruce is looking for some way to have Word automatically mark long sentences in a document. For instance, he may want to have those sentences with more than 20 words marked in some color so that they are easily located.
Fortunately, Word maintains a Sentences collection, accessible through VBA, that consists of each sentence in a document. You can examine each item in this collection (each individual sentence) to determine if it is longer than your desired length. The following macro provides an example of how this is done.
Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Office 365. If you are using an earlier version (Word 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Word, click here: 
Sub Mark_Long()
Dim iMyCount As Integer
Dim iWords As Integer
If Not ActiveDocument.Saved Then
ActiveDocument.Save
End If
'Reset counter
iMyCount = 0
'Set number of words
iWords = 20
For Each MySent In ActiveDocument.Sentences
If MySent.Words.Count > iWords Then
MySent.Font.Color = wdColorRed
iMyCount = iMyCount + 1
End If
Next
MsgBox iMyCount & " sentences longer than " & _
iWords & " words."
End Sub
Notice that each sentence is examined, and if it is longer than the desired length (defined by the variable iWords) then the sentence is changed to a red font color. This makes it easy to examine the document and discover which sentences exceed the length you specified.
Note:
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (11909) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Office 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Finding Long Sentences.
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2021-09-10 09:16:26
Ken Blair
Thank, KE. I'll work on getting the results into an array so I can place in a document.
2021-09-09 04:19:16
KE
To Ken Blair
The following example searches for the text "mytext", selects the surrounding sentence and displays the text of the sentence in a message box.
Sub SentenceContainingFind()
With Selection.Find
.ClearFormatting
.Execute findtext:="mytext"
End With
Selection.Sentences(1).Select
MsgBox Selection.Range.Text
End Sub
2021-09-08 14:59:19
Ken Blair
Alan,
What does Word use to demarc the sentences? I have a need to modify your VBA to search for a certain word's occurrence and then extract the sentence that contains it. Knowing the demarcs might make that an easier process.
2021-09-07 13:10:41
MZ
Using MS Word 2019 and the above macro, but it is miscounting the words. It appears that it is also counting punctuation as its own word (and maybe format codes too). This creates too many false markups. Any way to have Words.Count number match the MS Word value for the same sentence?
2021-06-17 03:30:45
soja
Thanks Allen for your VBA
best regards
2020-01-18 08:12:55
Patty
Thanks, Allen, for this sweet tip. If I used this macro in most documents I edit, all the text would be red! Unfortunately, I'd have to use 50 as the cutoff (iWords = 50 in the macro). But this would be a great pre-editing tool to analyze just how dense the prose is. In other words, "Red text cannot easily be read"!
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