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The Fog Index

Posted on Thursday, September 28, 2017 at 2:48 PM

Assessing the readability of an excerpt from TheAtlantic.com.

This month's Fog Index sample text comes from a September 11 TheAtlantic.com piece ("A Simple Way to Bring Down College-Application Costs" by James S. Murphy"). Here's the text, with longer words italicized:

"It is difficult to calculate the degree to which score fees prevent low-income students from going to a school that is a good fit, but a recently published paper by the University of Pittsburgh's Lindsay Page and several other researchers, including one from the College Board, shows several positive effects of the 'anytime' option. After the option was implemented in 2007, data suggest, students who would've otherwise only sent four scores were now sending eight. In other words, before the change, there was a cohort of students who wanted to apply more widely but had been held back by the cost. Perhaps most tellingly, the study showed that the policy change correlated with greater college-completion rates among the same cohort, potentially because applying to more schools meant they found a better institutional fit."

Word count: 133 words
Average sentence length: 33 words (54, 21, 26, 32)
Words with 3+ syllables: 11 percent (15/133 words)
Fog Index: (33+11) *.4 = 17 (17.6, no rounding)

By now, you've read enough Fog Index columns to spot likely culprits at a glance when the score is high. The length of the first sentence (54 words) should jump right out at you. We have a longer sample than usual (133 words), yet it's only split into four sentences. Let's see if we can cut through the Fog enough to shave at least 6 points from the score.

"It is tough to measure the degree to which score fees prevent low-income students from going to a school that is a good fit. A recent paper by the University of Pittsburgh's Lindsay Page and several other researchers, including one from the College Board, shows several benefits of the 'anytime' option. After the option was implemented in 2007, data suggest, students who would've only sent four scores were now sending eight. In other words, before the change, there was a cohort of students who wanted to apply more widely but had been held back by the cost. Perhaps most tellingly, the study showed that the new option correlated with greater college-completion rates among the same cohort. Potentially, applying to more schools meant they found a better institutional fit."

Word count: 128 words
Average sentence length: 21 words (24, 27, 20, 26, 19, 12)
Words with 3+ syllables: 8 percent (10/128 words)
Fog Index: (21+8) *.4 = 11 (11.6, no rounding)

It took some doing, but we were able to rework the text to be 6 points lighter. Our main objective was to increase the total sentence count, and we were able to make 6 sentences where there had been 4. This got us most of the way there, but we were still shy of our goal (a score below 12). To push ourselves across the finish line we targeted a few longer words for replacement, and this did the trick.

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