I wanted to do this recently following some feedback and the solution was so useful I thought it worth posting here. MS Word will tell you how many words there are in a certain section of text but it doesn't have a specific command for telling you how many occurrences there are of a certain word or phrase. However, there is a way to get this and it's dead simple.

In Word, press CTRL + H to bring up the 'Find & Replace' dialogue. In the 'Find What' bit at the top, put the word or phrase you're looking for. If it's a single word, make sure you check the 'Find Whole Words Only' box near the bottom. In the 'Replace With' bit, put ^& (that's a circumflex followed by an ampersand), no spaces, no quotes. This tells Word to replace what is in the 'Find What' box with itself. So, if you're looking for 'and', it'll find and replace it with 'and' and effectively your text isn't changed.

Hit the 'Replace All' button and Word pops up saying it's made a number of replacements, and that's your number of occurrences!

Hope someone finds this useful.

Jon

Having just had a copy-editor pick up six instances of 'look' in half a page, and four 'suddenly's in a page, thank you, Jon that's very useful!

Emma

<Added>

Not that I took them all out, mind you - some of the repetitions were deliberate. But it was extrememly salutary, specially as I tend to notice other writer's repetitions with a certain smug disapproval.

<Added>

and other writers' misplaced apostrophes!

or alternatively, you can go to the homepage of WriteWords, scroll down to the bottom and look on the RHS of the page.

An ingenious idea Jon but potentially disastrous if you accidentally mis-type the word!

Elspeth, that's too scary 'cos it shows you everything you're repeating too often. I only want to check the ones I know about Should have spotted that really, ah, well.

Traveller, well, that's easy to solve. Just replace the mistake with the right word again, then if you make another mistake, replace that one. If you make another mistake you probably shouldn't be using a keyboard.

Jon