Speeding up a Microsoft Word handler

My script is feeding a long string made from a list of articles in InDesign. I am outputting a Microsoft Word document. I want to delineate the “title” paragraphs of the string from the rest. I made this handler:


on textblue()
	with timeout of 60000 seconds
		tell application "Microsoft Word"
			set myPars to every paragraph of active document
			set myTitle to text object of paragraph 1 of active document --first paragraph
			set color index of font object of myTitle to blue --first paragraph is blue
			repeat with aPar in myPars --rest of the paragraphs
				if content of text object of aPar starts with "Story: " then --signifies the first paragraph of an article
					
					set myRange to text object of aPar
					
					set color index of font object of myRange to blue
				end if
			end repeat
		end tell
	end timeout
end textblue


Problem is this takes a really long time. Is there a way of speeding this up?