Calculating the Fog Index of a Wired.com excerpt.

This month, we'll test a passage from a June 27 Wired.com article ("The Troubling Truth of Why It's Still So Hard to Share Files Directly" by Parker Higgins). Here's the excerpt:

"This conundrum has no easy resolution. The qualities that the copyright lobby dislike about peer-to-peer are precisely the ones that make it a powerful choice for defenders of press freedom and personal privacy. Namely, peer-to-peer offers no convenient mechanism for centralized surveillance or censorship. By design, there's usually no middleman that can easily record metadata about transfers -- who uploaded and downloaded what, when, and from where -- or block those transfers. With some peer-to-peer implementations (though not Lee's) that information may be publicly accessible. But recording all of it would require a dragnet effort, not a simple request for a log file from a centralized service provider."

--Word count: 106 words
--Average sentence length: 18 words (6, 27, 11, 26, 13, 23)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 21 percent (22/106 words)
--Fog Index: (18+21)*.4 = 15 (no rounding)

The average sentence length is pretty modest here at 18 words. We can certainly work to trim this. However, the biggest culprit appears to be longer words. Let's see if some rephrasing can reduce our Fog score.

"This problem has no easy solution. The copyright lobby dislikes the same qualities of peer-to-peer that press freedom and personal privacy defenders find powerful. Namely, peer-to-peer offers no convenient mode of centralized surveillance or censorship. By design, there's often no middleman that can easily record transfer metadata -- who uploaded and downloaded what, when, and from where -- or block those transfers. With some peer-to-peer programs (though not Lee's), the public may be able to access that data. But recording it all would entail a dragnet effort, not a simple request for a log file from a central service provider."

--Word count: 98 words
--Average sentence length: 16 words (6, 18, 11, 25, 16, 22)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 12 percent (12/98 words)
--Fog Index: (16+13)*.4 = 11 (no rounding)

Our edits didn't affect total word count much, but they did bring down sentence length by 2 points. More important, we reduced the percentage of longer words by 9 points. Thus, we ended up cutting the overall Fog by 4 points.

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