Assessing the readability of a NYTimes.com excerpt.

This month's Fog Index excerpt comes from a March 29 NYTimes.com article ("Apple's New Challenge: Learning How the U.S. Cracked Its iPhone" by Katie Benner, John Markoff, and Nicole Perlroth). Here's the text we'll be analyzing:

"Making matters trickier, Apple's security operation has been in flux. The operation was reorganized late last year. A manager who had been responsible for handling most of the government's data extraction requests left the team to work in a different part of the company, according to four current and former Apple employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the changes. Other employees, among them one whose tasks included trying to hack Apple's own products, left the company over the last few months, they said, while new people have joined."

--Word count: 99 words
--Average sentence length: 25 words (10, 7, 53, 29)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 16 percent (16/99 words)
--Fog Index: (25+16)*.4 = 16 (16.4, no rounding)

We have some work to do here to shave five points off the Fog Index. One quarter of the sampled words fall into the "longer" grouping, and the third sentence accounts for over half the total word count. Let's see if we can push some of the Fog out to sea:

"Making matters trickier, Apple's security operation has been in flux since it was reorganized last year. A manager who had handled most of the government's data requests left the team to work elsewhere in Apple. Four current and former Apple staffers spoke about this on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the changes. Other staffers, among them one whose tasks included hacking Apple's own products, left over the last few months, they said. In the meantime new people have joined."

--Word count: 86 words
--Average sentence length: 17 words (16, 19, 24, 20, 7)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 8 percent (7/86 words)
--Fog Index: (17+9)*.4 = 10 (14.0, no rounding)

Our most important task was breaking up the hefty 53-word sentence from the original. We also split up the last sentence, which was on the longer side. We also made a conscious effort to reduce the number of longer words, which paid off. We were able to reduce the percentage of longer words by half.

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