Assessing the readability of a Sciencemag.org excerpt.

This month, we're calculating the Fog Index of an excerpt from a July 25 Sciencemag.org article ("Liquid Water Spied Deep Below Polar Ice Cap on Mars" by Daniel Clery). Here is the sample text, with longer words italicized:

"The radar brightness alone isn't enough to prove that liquid water is responsible. Another clue comes from the permittivity of the reflecting material: its ability to store energy in an electric field. Water has a higher permittivity than rock and ice. Calculating permittivity requires knowing the signal power reflected by the bright patch, something the researchers could only estimate. But they find the permittivity of the patch to be higher than anywhere else on Mars -- and comparable to the subglacial lakes on Earth. Although the team cannot measure the thickness of the water layer, Orosei says it is much more than a thin film."

--Word count: 104 words
--Average sentence length: 17 words (13, 19, 9, 18, 24, 21)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 14 percent (15/104 words)
--Fog Index: (17+14) *.4 = 12 (12.4, no rounding)

Overall, though, the writer conveys the information clearly without getting lost in the fog. But we need to cut a point from the Fog Index to fall within ideal range. Can a simple edit to the third sentence do the trick?

"The radar brightness alone isn't enough to prove that liquid water is present. Another clue comes from the permittivity of the reflecting material: its ability to store energy in an electric field. Water has a higher permittivity than rock and ice. To gauge permittivity, one must know the signal power reflected by the bright patch, something the researchers could only estimate. But they find the permittivity of the patch to be higher than anywhere else on Mars -- and comparable to the subglacial lakes on Earth. Although the team cannot measure the thickness of the water layer, Orosei says it is much more than a thin film."

--Word count: 106 words
--Average sentence length: 18 words (13, 19, 9, 20, 24, 21)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 11 percent (12/106 words)
--Fog Index: (18+11) *.4 = (11.6, no rounding)

We had our work cut out for us, particularly with the four-time usage of the word "permittivity." We had trouble cutting any of these instances, so we had to direct our efforts elsewhere. In the end, all it took was a word swap in the first sentence and a minor recast in the third sentence. We gained a point in average sentence length and two words in the overall count, but we cut a point from our score.

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