Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007 and 2010. 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 and 2010. 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.
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 and 2010. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Finding Long Sentences.
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2016-11-23 07:37:59
Joe
Thanks for this, works great!
If I then go and change some of the sentences to less than 20 words and run the macro again, is there any way to change the sentences that are less than 20 words back to black, rather than staying red?
Thanks!
2014-11-26 15:20:14
Darin Ramsey
Allen--
This is very useful for us, as our group supports a large engineering organization on a Federal project. I've altered your macro to pull the average sentence length from the readability statistics, double it, and change those sentences red. Unfortunately, it appears to be counting punctuation as "words." In a document with an average sentence length of 20.3, a sentence with 37 words (according to the GUI) and five internal marks (a set of parentheses, a semicolon, and two commas) was going red until I removed four of the marks. Which four doesn't make any difference, so it seems to be counting all of them. Do you have any advice on getting the VBA word count to more accurately align with Word's GUI count? The changes in the code are as follows:
After the save, insert this:
Set myRange = ActiveDocument.Content
wordval = myRange.ReadabilityStatistics(6).Value
When setting the iWords value, use this:
iWords = wordval * 2
2013-12-18 02:32:27
Rochelle Fisher
We got an error on the first run, that MySent is not defined. Added: Dim MySent As Object
(At first, defined it as Sentences, but that caused other problems.)
2013-11-26 21:53:50
aiway
hi !
how do i get it to undo the red marks on my file ?
thanks !
a
2013-10-17 14:22:58
Mike Korner
Just wanted to say thanks for this Allen. It was helpful today.
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