Assessing the readability of a NewYorker.com excerpt.

This month, we're measuring the Fog in a May 15 sample from NewYorker.com ("Why Nouns Slow Us Down, and Why Linguistics Might Be in a Bubble" by Alan Burdick). Here's the text, with longer words in italics:

"Which is to say, the future word casts a shadow over the present one. And that shadow is measurable: the researchers found that, in all nine languages, the speech immediately preceding a noun is three-and-a-half-per-cent slower than the speech preceding a verb. And in eight of nine languages, the speaker was about twice as likely to introduce a pause before a noun than before a verb -- either a brief silence or a filler, such as 'uh' or 'um' or their non-English equivalents. That future word, when it's a noun, is more of a footfall than a shadow, creating a hole in the phrase right before it."

--Word count: 106 words
--Average sentence length: 27 words (14, 28, 40, 24)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 5 percent (5/106 words)
--Fog Index: (27 + 5) *.4 = 12.8 (12, no rounding)

We want our Fog Index score to be below 12, so we need to find a way to shave 1 point off the score. Our percentage of longer words is quite low. At a glance, then, it appears that we'll want to pare down average sentence length. Let's give it a try:

"Which is to say, the future word casts a shadow over the present one. And that shadow is measurable. The researchers found that, in all nine languages, the speech immediately preceding a noun is 3.5 percent slower than the speech preceding a verb. And in eight of nine languages, the speaker was about twice as likely to introduce a pause before a noun than before a verb -- either a brief silence or a filler, such as 'uh' or 'um' or their non-English equivalents. That future word, when it's a noun, is more of a footfall than a shadow. It creates a hole in the phrase right before it."

--Word count: 108 words
--Average sentence length: 18 words (14, 5, 24, 40, 15, 10)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 5 percent (5/109 words)
--Fog Index: (18 + 5) *.4 = 9 (9.2, no rounding)

We gained two words in this edit, largely because we recast "three-and-a-half-per-cent" as "3.5 percent. Despite that slight gain, we shaved 3 points off our original Fog score. There was no magic or sleight of hand here. All we did was split up two longer sentences. That was all it took to bring the score down by 25 percent, from 12 to 9.

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