Couple things you do, first apply guide below and second make use https://www.repairtoolbox.com/wordrepair... Word Repair Toolbox
The first thing you must do is copy the file from the stick to the HD. Don't make matters worse by trying to work with it from the stick. There's a possibility the document is already corrupted, but the problem you describe may not really be document corruption. It may be just an annoying little glitch occasionally seen in older versions of Word, whereby letters in a line get compacted in printing:
The conventional solution is this:
In the Print dialog, switch to another printer and then back, or close Word and delete the files you find by searching for
~$*.*;*.tmp
Then restart Word.
If that doesn't help, then, since this is Word 2003, there are a couple of other things you can try:
In Word's Open dialog, select the file, click the arrow beside Open, and choose Open and Repair.
If that doesn't help, then change the "Files of type" setting to "Recover Text from Any File." You'll get a file with a lot of "garbage" at the beginning and end and just plain text in between, but, since I'm guessing there's not a whole lot of formatting involved in this document, just recovering the text would probably be a help.