Assessing the readability of a Yahoo.com excerpt.

This month, we'll measure the Fog in a sample from an August 28 Yahoo.com article ("Facebook Has Introduced a User Trustworthiness Score -- Here's Why It Should Go Further" by Sharon Coen). Here's the text with longer words italicized:

"While we do have biases in our thinking, most of us want to feel useful and valuable. Studies have now shown how people use social media as a kind of identity laboratory, constructing a particular image of themselves that they present to the world. Our own research shows how Facebook use is associated with our need to feel like we belong to a community and that we are worthy and capable individuals. In a way, introducing reputation scores that users can access would satisfy this need, while also making sure that people do not feel discouraged from flagging content for fear of being profiled and singled out by the platform."

Word count: words Average sentence length: 28 words (17, 27, 28, 38)
Words with 3+ syllables: 11 percent (12/110 words)
Fog Index: (28+11) *.4 = 15 (15.6, no rounding)

The Fog level is quite high in this sample. Sentence length emerges as a clear culprit at a glance. We have 110 words, a large sample for our purposes, split into just 4 sentences. The last sentence, at 38 words, comprises one third of the total word count. Here's our edit:

"While we do have biases in our thinking, most of us want to feel useful and valuable. Studies have now shown how people use social media as a kind of identity laboratory, constructing a certain image of themselves that they present to the world. Our own research shows how Facebook use is linked with our need to feel like we belong to a community and that we are worthy and capable people. In a way, offering reputation scores that users can access would fill this need. It would also ensure that people do not feel discouraged from flagging content for fear of being profiled and singled out by the platform."

Word count: 110 words
Average sentence length: 22 words (17, 27, 28, 14, 24)
Words with 3+ syllables: 7 percent (8/110 words)
Fog Index: (22+7) *.4 = 11 (11.6, no rounding)

Our first task was to split up the 38-word sentence that was weighing down the original. This got us part of the way there, but our work wasn't done. We decided to tackle the fraction of longer words and were able to cut 4 points from that part of the score. Overall, this allowed us to reduce the Fog by exactly 4 points, from 15 to 11.

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