« Editorial Shakeup at Deadspin | Home | Making Every Word Count »

The Fog Index

Posted on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 at 11:17 PM

Assessing the readability of an AndroidCentral.com excerpt.

This month's sample text comes from an October 29 AndroidCentral.com article ("A Nearly Impossible to Remove Android Malware Has Infected 45,000 Devices" by Muhammad Jarir Kanji). Here's the excerpt we're analyzing:

"Malwarebytes suggests the app comes in two variants: semi-stealth and full-stealth. In both configurations, the app does not create an app icon or a shortcut icon in order to ensure users do not notice the app's presence on their device. This also prevents them from easily uninstalling the nasty piece of work from their devices; after all, if there's no app icon on your launcher, how can you drag it to the uninstall button? The only way an average smartphone user would even notice its presence is thanks to the xHelper notification icon that these ad notifications are accompanied by in the app's semi-stealth variant. The full-stealth configuration doesn't even have that."

--Word count: 112 words
--Average sentence length: 22 words (11, 29, 34, 31, 7)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 9 percent (10/112 words)
--Fog Index (22+9)* .4 = 12 (12.4, no rounding)

This sample isn't too far off the mark. We need to cut only 1 point from the Fog Index here to fall within ideal range. There are a lot of options to achieve this. Let's see what works best here:

"Malwarebytes suggests the app comes in two variants: semi-stealth and full-stealth. Because neither version creates an app icon or a shortcut icon, users don't notice the app's presence on their devices. This also prevents them from easily removing the nasty piece of work from their devices. After all, if there's no app icon on your launcher, how can you drag it to the uninstall button? The only way an average smartphone user would even notice its presence is thanks to the xHelper notification icon that accompanies these ad notifications in the semi-stealth app version. The full-stealth configuration doesn't even have that."

--Word count: 101 words
--Average sentence length: 17 words (11, 20, 15, 19, 29, 7)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 8 percent (8/101 words)
--Fog Index (17+8)* .4 = 10 (10.0, no rounding)

Mainly we eliminated 2 longer words and made 6 sentences out of 5. But we also tried to smooth out the syntax in places to improve the flow. These changes helped us to cut 2 points from the original Fog score.

Add your comment.

« Editorial Shakeup at Deadspin | Top | Making Every Word Count »