Not sure exactly what you mean by the ASCII formatting characters, but think it may be the show/hide formatting codes.
(this is my word 2002, but it may be different in other versions):
You can find a button to do this in the standard toolbar immediately to the left of the zoom percentage, which is towards the right hand side of the toolbar.
It looks like a set of vertical parallel lines with a horizontal line across the top and a solid semicircle on the right hand side of the right vertical line.
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