Assessing the readability of a Time.com sample.

This month's Fog Index excerpt comes from an October 9 Time.com article ("Here's Why You Shouldn't Take a Sleeping Pill Every Night" by Markham Heid). Here's the sample, with longer words in italics:

"The authors of the study tried to control for pre-existing medical conditions and other factors that could explain why people taking these drugs died or developed cancer at higher rates than non-users. The drugs were also associated with car accidents, falls and depression -- all of which could explain the elevated mortality risks. But the risks remained. The authors also found associations between the use of hypnotics and specific types of cancer -- notably, lymphomas and cancers of the lungs, colon and prostate -- but they did not offer any cause-and-effect mechanisms that might explain the links. More recent research, in both people and animals, has turned up more preliminary links to cancer."

Word count: 110 words
Average sentence length: 22 words (32, 20, 4, 38, 16)
Words with 3+ syllables: 15 percent (16/110 words)
Fog Index: (22+15) *.4 = 14 (14.8, no rounding)

Cutting the fog in medical reporting can be challenging. Complex medical terms can inflate the percentage of longer words, but they're not easily replaced. Let's see if we can cut 3 points' worth of fog without culling vital information.

"The authors of the study tried to control for pre-existing illnesses and other factors that could explain why people taking these drugs died or developed cancer at higher rates than non-users. The drugs were also linked to car accidents, falls and depression -- all of which could explain the higher mortality risks. But the risks remained. The authors also found associations between the use of hypnotics and certain types of cancer -- notably, lymphomas and cancers of the lungs, colon and prostate. But they did not offer any cause-and-effect mechanisms that might explain the links. More recent research, in both people and animals, has turned up more preliminary links to cancer."

Word count: 110 words
Average sentence length: 18 words (32, 20, 4, 25, 13, 16)
Words with 3+ syllables: 10 percent (11/110 words)
Fog Index: (18+10) *.4 = 11 (11.2, no rounding)

By eliminating 5 longer words and splitting up 1 longer sentence, we cut the fog by 3 points.

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