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The Fog Index

Posted on Tuesday, June 30, 2015 at 1:22 AM

Assessing the readability of a WSJ.com article.

This month's sample text comes from a June 26 WSJ.com blog post ("Artificial Intelligence Machine Gets Testy With Its Programmer" by Amir Mizroch). Here's the sample text:

"The exchange sheds further light on the latest work carried out by large technology firms in the field of artificial intelligence, a booming field as data availability rises and computing costs plummet. This specific work is part of recent developments in what's known as cognitive computing -- teaching computers to mimic some of the ways a human brain works. Much work in this field is being done in natural language processing -- taking text or speech as it spoken by humans or as it appears in books and documents and teaching machines to extract meaning and context from it. The Google app, Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana personal assistants are all products of this natural language research."

--Word count: 115 words
--Average sentence length: 29 words (32, 26, 39, 18 words)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 11 percent (13/115 words)
--Fog Index: (29+11)*.4 = 16 (no rounding)

We have some longer sentences that are fogging up the text. Let's see if we can clear it up with some minor edits to address this issue.

"The exchange sheds further light on the latest work carried out by large tech firms in the field of artificial intelligence. It's a booming field as data availability rises and computing costs plummet. This specific work is part of recent advances in cognitive computing -- teaching computers to mimic certain ways a human brain works. Much work in this field involves natural language processing. Using speech as it spoken by humans or text as it appears in print, we can teach machines to extract meaning and context from it. The Google app, Apple's Siri, and Microsoft's Cortana personal assistants are all products of this natural language research."

--Word count: 106 words
--Average sentence length: 18 words (21, 12, 21, 9, 25, 18 words)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 9 percent (10/106 words)
--Fog Index: (18+9)*.4 = 10 (no rounding)

The major change here is the number of sentences. The original sample had 4; our version has 6. In breaking up the longer sentences and making some other minor edits, we cut 6 points from the original Fog score.

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