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The Fog Index

Posted on Saturday, September 29, 2018 at 12:01 AM

Assessing the readability of a TheDailyBeast.com excerpt.

This month, we calculate the Fog index of sample text from a September 6 TheDailyBeast.com piece ("Almost Half of Young Facebook Users Deleted the App This Year, New Survey Finds" by Kelly Weill). Here's the excerpt:

"A new survey by the Pew Research Center found that most adults surveyed had curbed their Facebook use or adjusted their privacy settings in the past year. The survey followed revelations that political consulting company Cambridge Analytica had scraped the personal information of approximately 87 million Facebook users for use in targeted advertising. Of the 4,594 Pew survey respondents, young adults were the most likely to unplug from platform, with 44 percent of Facebook users ages 18 to 29 saying they'd deleted the app from their phone, although the survey did not ask whether respondents had deleted their accounts, too."

Word count: 100 words
Average sentence length: 33 words (27, 26, 47)
Words with 3+ syllables: 10 percent (10/100 words)
Fog Index: (33+10) *.4 = 17 (17.2, no rounding)

We're left with a pretty high Fog score. Sentence length is a key factor here; there are just three sentences in the sample. The last sentence comprises nearly half the total word count. Let's get to work cutting at least 6 points from the standing Fog index.

"A new survey by the Pew Research Center found that most adults surveyed had curbed their Facebook use or adjusted their privacy settings in the past year. The survey followed revelations that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had scraped the personal data of roughly 87 million Facebook users for use in targeted ads. Of the 4,594 Pew survey respondents, young adults were the most likely to unplug from platform. Forty-four percent of Facebook users ages 18 to 29 said they'd deleted the app from their phone. But the survey did not ask whether respondents had deleted their accounts, too."

Word count: 99 words
Average sentence length: 20 words (27, 26, 16, 17, 13)
Words with 3+ syllables: 6 percent (6/99 words)
Fog Index: (20+6) *.4 = 10 (10.4, no rounding)

Our main goal was to split up the last sentence into smaller parts. We were able to turn that one sentence into three. What's more, we cut the percentage of longer words from 10 percent to 6 percent, nearly by half. Overall, these changes cut the Fog by 7 points.

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