Dragging with the mouse is the way most people first learned to select text. In this time-honored method, you click at the start of where you want to select text, and while holding down the mouse button, drag until the text in question is highlighted.
Note:
Don't forget Word's multi-selection feature, which has been around since Word X. You can select bits of text far apart from each other simultaneously and then cut, copy, and paste them all at once. You can grab a single sentence from the first paragraph of a document and a couple sentences from the second—and scrap everything else (see page 58).