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The Fog Index

Posted on Monday, November 28, 2011 at 12:51 PM

Assessing the readability of a TheAtlantic.com excerpt.

This month, we examine a passage from a recent TheAtlantic.com article ("Forget Shopping, Friday Is Update Your Parents' Browser Day!" by Alexis Madrigal):

This year, though, do something different. Don't just explain to Grandpa or Mom or your father-in-law that there is a whole world of secure web browsing out there. No, take a firm stand. Tell them they won't be able to watch funny fishing videos on YouTube with IE6 anymore. Usually, by this point, most parents are begging for help and you can extract excellent perquisites for your labor. That big bedroom your little sister got for some reason? Now's the time to finally occupy it. While you're at it, you will probably fix (or set up) the wifi, which you can helpfully explain is like Internet particles floating in the air.

--Word count: 111
--Average sentence length: 14 words (6, 22, 5, 16, 19, 10, 7, 26)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 10 percent (11/111 words)
--Fog Index: (14+10)*.4 = 9 (no rounding)

For the first time, we've selected a passage whose Fog score falls within ideal range (i.e., below 12). If our sole goal is to attain a score below 12, then our work here is done. However, there are some places we can tweak slightly. Here's our attempt:

This year, though, do something different. Don't just explain to Grandpa or Mom or your father-in-law that there is a whole world of secure web browsing out there. No, take a firm stand. Tell them they won't be able to watch funny fishing videos on YouTube with IE6 anymore. Your parents will likely beg you for help and reward you for it. That big bedroom your little sister got for some reason? Now's the time to finally occupy it. While you're at it, you can fix (or set up) the wifi, which you can describe as Internet particles floating in the air.

--Word count: 102
--Average sentence length: 13 words (6, 22, 5, 16, 13, 10, 7, 23)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 5 percent (6/111 words)
--Fog Index: (13+5)*.4 = 7 (no rounding)

We didn't do much to the original sample. Its Fog index was already ideal, but it still needed a tweak here and there for clarity. These minimal changes brought the Fog score down by two points.

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