Assessing the readability of a BusinessInsider.com excerpt.

This month's sample passage comes from a February 26 BusinessInsider.com piece ("Smartphones Are Getting Weird Again, and It Could Be a Sign That the Industry Is on the Brink of Another Huge Change" by Lisa Eadicicco). Here's the excerpt, with longer words in italics:

"That's not to say these new offbeat devices will play a role in boosting industry sales, and they may not be emblematic of the next major evolution of the smartphone. After all, the feature phones with retractable keyboards that dominated the early 2000s, such as the T-Mobile Sidekick, don't look anything like the sleek rectangular touchscreen smartphones we use today. But the Sidekick and others set the stage for an era in which we use our phones for much more than just texting. These new foldable devices may similarly lay the foundation for whatever comes next. While what exactly that entails remains unclear, one thing is for sure -- such devices are no longer just prototypes or concepts, they're on the horizon."

--Word count: 121 words
--Average sentence length: 24 words (30, 30, 23, 13, 25)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 10 percent (12/121 words)
--Fog Index (24+10)* .4 = 13 (13.6, no rounding)

Here we need to cut 2 points from the existing Fog score to fall within ideal range. Average sentence length is on the hefty side, with 121 words split into just 5 sentences. Let's try to cut through the Fog:

"That's not to say these new offbeat devices will play a role in boosting industry sales. They may not be emblematic of the next major evolution of the smartphone, either. After all, the feature phones with retractable keyboards that dominated the early 2000s, such as the T-Mobile Sidekick, don't look anything like the sleek smartphones we use today. But the Sidekick and others set the stage for an era in which we use our phones for much more than just texting. These new foldable devices may likewise lay the foundation for whatever comes next. While what that entails remains unclear, one thing is for sure -- such devices are no longer just prototypes or concepts. They're on the horizon."

--Word count: 118 words
--Average sentence length: 17 words (16, 14, 28, 23, 13, 20, 4)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 8 percent (9/118 words)
--Fog Index (17+8)* .4 = 10 (10.0, no rounding)

Our minor edits yielded big rewards. By turning 5 sentences into 7 and eliminating several longer words, we cut the Fog by 4 points. Remember, the ideal Fog Index for a text passage is below 12. Weighing in at just 9 points, our version falls well within that range.

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