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The Fog Index

Posted on Sunday, October 29, 2017 at 8:28 PM

Assessing the readability of a Buzzfeed.com excerpt.

This month's Fog Index sample text comes from an October 27 Buzzfeed.com piece ("Myspace Looked Like It Was Back. Actually, It Was a Pawn in an Ad Fraud Scheme" by Craig Silverman). Here's the text, with longer words italicized:

"This is the latest in an ongoing catalog of fraud in programmatic advertising that continues to shake confidence in the digital media industry. Last week a BuzzFeed News investigation revealed that ad industry insiders profited from a network of 'zombie websites' that used special code to trigger an avalanche of fraudulent views of video ads. The growing awareness of ad fraud among brands and agencies is causing major advertisers to pull back budgets and demand more accountability from their partners. Industry leaders expect more than $16 billion to be stolen by fraudsters this year alone."

Word count: 95 words
Average sentence length: 24 words (23, 32, 25, 15)
Words with 3+ syllables: 20 percent (19/95 words)
Fog Index: (24+20) *.4 = 17 (17.6, no rounding)

We need to cut 6 points from the Fog Index to fall below 12. At a glance, we see a large number of longer words (1 out of 5, to be precise). But we also have nearly 100 words split into just 4 sentences, making for a high average sentence length. Let's see if we can attack this on both fronts to bring down the score.

"This is the latest in an ongoing onslaught of fraud in programmatic advertising that has shaken trust in the digital media business. Last week BuzzFeed News revealed that ad insiders profited from a network of 'zombie websites.' These sites have used special code to trigger a flood of phony video ad views. The growing awareness of ad fraud among brands and agencies is causing major advertisers to pull back budgets and demand more accountability from their partners. Ad leaders expect more than $16 billion to be stolen by fraudsters this year alone."

Word count: 92 words
Average sentence length: 18 words (22, 15, 15, 25, 15)
Words with 3+ syllables: 11 percent (10/92 words)
Fog Index: (18+11) *.4 = 11 (11.6, no rounding)

We had to wrestle with the sample quite a bit to cut 6 points from the original Fog score. We were only able to split up one longer sentence, making 5 sentences where there were 4. So the bulk of our efforts had to go to cutting the percentage of longer words. This proved difficult, but we were able to cut the number from 19 words to 10. Ultimately, we ended up with an ideal score of 11.

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