Ouch! I'm guessing you had to format your hard drive?

Have you tried a program like Recuva to search for your old documents? Granted, depending on the malware there's a small chance they could be infected, but as long as you stick to Word documents and give them a good scan after recovering them before you open them, it should be pretty safe.

After scanning and removing the malware, I just deleted everything that was corrupted...guess I got a little frustrated and carried away. Thanks for the tip, though; should anything happen again I'll give that a try.

As long as your computer hasn't written over it, the data still exists. Just not accessible through ordinary means.