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The Fog Index

Posted on Tuesday, January 30, 2018 at 5:12 PM

Assessing the readability of an NYMag.com sample.

This month's Fog Index excerpt comes from a January 28 NYMag.com piece ("Fitness Data Map Shows Locations and Activity Patterns of Secret Military Bases" by Chas Danner). Here's the text, with longer words italicized:

"Information collected and published by the fitness tracking and sharing app Strava has highlighted the locations of secret military bases and revealed sensitive information about the activity of personnel at those bases. On Saturday, an Australian student and security analyst named Nathan Ruser tweeted that Stava's Global Heatmap of every GPS-linked fitness activity uploaded by users also includes data from app users at military bases operated by the U.S., U.K., Russia, and other countries in places like Afghanistan and Syria. Furthermore, because few residents of a country like Syria are likely to use the app in the first place, it is particularly easy to locate areas of activity by foreign military personnel in some areas."

Word count: 115 words
Average sentence length: 38 words (32, 48, 35)
Words with 3+ syllables: 17 percent (20/115 words)
Fog Index: (38+17) *.4 = 22 (22.0, no rounding)

This sample carries the highest Fog Index we've seen in quite a while. The percentage of longer words is somewhat on the high side. This should resolve itself with a few simple edits. The main culprit, though, is clear at a glance: sentence length. We have 115 words, a fairly long sample, split into just three sentences. Let's see if we can cut the Fog by 11 points to fall within ideal range.

"Data collected and published by the fitness tracking and sharing app Strava has highlighted the locations of secret military bases. It has also revealed sensitive personnel movement at those bases. On Saturday, Australian student and security analyst Nathan Ruser tweeted about Stava's Global Heatmap. According to the tweet, every GPS-linked fitness activity uploaded by users also includes data from app users at military bases run by the U.S., U.K., Russia, and other countries in places like Afghanistan and Syria. Few people in a country like Syria are likely to use the app in the first place. This makes it particularly easy to locate zones of foreign military activity in some regions."

Word count: 111 words
Average sentence length: 19 words (20, 10, 14, 35, 17, 15)
Words with 3+ syllables: 10 percent (11/111 words)
Fog Index: (19+9=10) *.4 = 11 (11.6, no rounding)

It took some editorial muscle to shave 11 points from the original sample. Although we planned to mainly tackle sentence length, we ended up cutting a lot of longer words too. Ultimately, we were able to create 6 sentences out of the original 3. This cut the average sentence length in half. We also cut the number of longer words in half, cutting the percentage by nearly half. This left us with a Fog Index of 11, half of the original.

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