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The Fog Index

Posted on Saturday, July 29, 2017 at 1:03 PM

Assessing the readability of a Mashable.com excerpt.

This month's Fog Index sample text comes from a July 19 article on Mashable.com ("Serving Up Technology in the Public's Interest-Hard, but Worth It" by Dipayan Ghosh). Longer words are italicized for reference.

Note: This month, we will show our work in multiple phases -- our first attempt followed by our second. Editing is often a multiphase process, and we don't always get it right on the first try.

"Over the next year and beyond, we'll be working to shape a novel sector that'll bring the top technologists from around the nation to work on projects that directly aim to do good for society. The public sector needs innovation -- whether to solve rural connectivity challenges, to spark interest in young people to study engineering and computer science, or to build the next major civic tech app. I am excited to help initiate a new project here around algorithmic discrimination, and in the meantime, collaborate with and support a high-powered group of peers who will tackle the nation's most gripping social challenges."

Word count: 102 words
Average sentence length: 34 words (35, 32, 35)
Words with 3+ syllables: 12 percent (12/102 words)
Fog Index: (34+12)*.4 = 18 (18.4, no rounding)

We have some Fog to cut through here. As many of you know by now, we're looking for a score below 12. So we need to cut the fog by more than a third to fall within ideal range. At a glance, we see that sentence length is the key issue in this sample. Let's see if we can rework the text into shorter sentences.

Attempt 1

"Over the next year and beyond, we'll be shaping a novel sector that'll bring the top technologists from around the nation to work on projects that aim to help society directly. The public sector needs innovation -- whether to solve rural connectivity challenges, to spark interest in young people to study engineering and computer science, or to build the next major civic tech app. I am excited to help initiate a new project here around algorithmic discrimination. In the meantime, I will collaborate with and support a high-powered group of peers who will tackle the nation's most gripping social challenges."

Word count: 99 words
Average sentence length: 25 words (31, 32, 13, 23)
Words with 3+ syllables: 12 percent (12/99 words)
Fog Index: (25+12)*.4 = 14 (14.8, no rounding)

This attempt cut the Fog by 4 points, a notable change. But we still need to reduce the score by 3 points for optimal readability. We didn't eliminate any longer words, but we did cut sentence length by 9 points. What should we do to get the rest of the way there?

Attempt 2

"Over the next year and beyond, we'll be shaping a novel sector that'll bring top technologists from around the nation to work on projects that aim to help people directly. The public sector needs innovation. We need to solve rural connectivity challenges, to get young people to study engineering and computer science, or to build the next major civic tech app. I am excited to help launch a new project here around algorithmic discrimination. In the meantime, I will team up with and support a high-powered group of peers who will tackle the nation's most gripping social challenges."

Word count: 98 words
Average sentence length: 20 words (30, 5, 26, 13, 24)
Words with 3+ syllables: 8 percent (8/98 words)
Fog Index: (20+8)*.4 = 11 (11.2, no rounding)

We had to get a little more aggressive this round, splitting up yet another sentence to bring down average sentence length by 5 points. We also eliminated 4 longer words to bring down the percentage of longer words by 4. Overall, our multiphase edit shaved 7 points from the original Fog Index.

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