Assessing the readability of a NYTimes.com excerpt.

This month, we calculate the Fog Index in an April 27, 2013, article on NYTimes.com ("How Big Data Is Playing Recruiter for Specialized Workers" by Matt Richtel). Here's the excerpt:

"David Lewin, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an expert in management of human resources, said that asking what someone could do was an important question, but so was asking whether the person could accomplish it with other people. Of all the efforts to predict whether someone will perform well in an organization, the most proven method, Dr. Lewin said, is a referral from someone already working there. Current employees know the culture, he said, and have their reputations and their work environment on the line. A recent study from the Yale School of Management that uses Big Data offers a refinement to the notion, finding that employee referrals are a great way to find good hires but that the method tends to work much better if the employee making the referral is highly productive."

--Word count: 139 words
--Average sentence length: 35 words (43, 29, 18, 49)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 12 percent (16/139 words)
--Fog Index: (35+12)*.4 = 18 (no rounding)

Here is our attempt to cut the Fog:

"UCLA professor David Lewin, an expert in human resource management, said that asking what someone could do was important. So was asking whether the person could do it with other people. Of all the efforts to predict whether someone will perform well in an organization, the most proven method, Dr. Lewin said, is a referral from someone who works there. Current employees know the culture, he said. Their reputations and their work environment are on the line. A recent Yale School of Management study that uses Big Data offers a refinement to the notion, finding that employee referrals are a great way to find good hires. But that method tends to work much better if the employee making the referral is highly productive."

--Word count: 124 words
--Average sentence length: 18 words (19, 12, 29, 7, 10, 29, 18)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 10 percent (13/124 words)
--Fog Index: (18+10)*.4 = 11 (no rounding)

We didn't want to reinvent the wheel here. The average sentence length was high, but we didn't want to ruin the cadence by splitting up too many sentences. We made some minor tweaks to reduce the percentage of longer words by 2 percent. We also split up a few sentences in places we thought logical to bring down the Fog score. Ultimately, we were able to reduce the piece by 7 points without making any major changes.

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Comment:

"Said that" ... "Dr. Lewin said" ... "he said" ... hmm, looks like they should have let the good dr. speak for himself via some direct quotations; would be much easier to read. --Dan Walsh, editor-in-chief, Mobile Beat