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The Fog Index

Posted on Saturday, June 29, 2019 at 8:33 PM

Assessing the readability of an NYMag.com excerpt.

This month's Fog Index sample comes from a June 27 NYMag.com piece ("Can You Spot a Deepfake? Does It Matter?" by Max Read). Here's the sample, with longer words in italics:

"Were either of the videos 'deepfakes,' or even just regular old staged fakes? Probably not -- but the difficulty of ascertaining, clearly, one way or another, the veracity of the videos, is the point. Deepfakes aren't a cause of misinformation, so much as a kind of symptom -- a technology that's only really relevant to us because we already live in a world that's having trouble settling on a consensus account of reality, and whose greatest use isn't creating fakes but undermining our ability to ascertain what's true. If you want a vision of the future, don't imagine an onslaught of fake video. Imagine an onslaught of commenters calling every video fake. Imagine a politician saying 'he has not been working out at the gym in a while, and his body isn't as built as in the video,' forever."

--Word count: 137 words
--Average sentence length: 23 words (13, 20, 53, 15, 9, 27)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 16 percent (22/137 words)
--Fog Index (23+16)* .4 = 15 (15.6, no rounding)

We have a high percentage of longer words: 16 percent. But at a glance we can see a more blatant culprit: the 53-word third sentence. We need to cut at least 4 points from the current Fog Index to reach our ideal score (below 12).

"Were either of the videos 'deepfakes,' or even just plain old staged fakes? Probably not -- but the difficulty of ascertaining clearly, one way or another, the videos' veracity, is the point. Deepfakes aren't so much a cause of misinformation as they are a kind of symptom. The technology only pertains to us because we live in a world that's having trouble reaching a consensus on reality. Its greatest use isn't creating fakes but undermining our ability to figure out what's true. If you want a vision of the future, don't picture an onslaught of fake video. Picture an onslaught of commenters calling every video fake. Picture a politician saying, 'He has not worked out at the gym in a while, and his body isn't as built as it is in the video,' forever."

--Word count: 133 words
--Average sentence length: 17 words (13, 18, 15, 20, 15, 15, 9, 28)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 12 percent (16/133 words)
--Fog Index (17+12)* .4 = 11 (11.6, no rounding

We addressed both sentence length and the number of longer words in our edit. Our crowning achievement was turning the 53-word sentence into 3 separate sentences, adding 2 sentences to the total count. This went a long way in cutting the Fog.

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