The Fog Index
Posted on Thursday, January 30, 2020 at 12:05 AM
Assessing the readability of a TheAtlantic.com excerpt.
This
month’s Fog Index sample text comes from a January 28 piece on
TheAtlantic.com (“The
Outsize Influence of Your Middle-School Friends” by Lydia
Denworth). Here’s the text, with longer words in italics:
“The
study revealed that instability rules, at least at the beginning.
Two-thirds of the children entering their first year of middle school
changed friends between the fall and the spring. Juvonen suspects that
has to do with the structure of the school system. Students arrive from
smaller elementary schools knowing a few other children from
fifth grade. At the start of the year, they stay close physically
and emotionally to those familiar classmates. But as they
settle into life in the new environment, their social horizons
expand. They gravitate to those with similar interests
of the kind that begin to solidify in these years -- soccer, theater,
robotics. Similarities, as always, attract. Earlier
friends often fall by the wayside.”
--Word count: 118 words
--Average sentence length: 13 words (11, 19, 13, 14, 16, 14, 20, 4, 7)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 13 percent (15/118 words) --Fog Index
(13+13)* .4 = 10 (10.4, no rounding)
As you can see from our
calculations above, this piece falls well within ideal Fog range. (We’re
looking for a score under 12.) What struck us as we were crunching the
numbers was the high number of sentences in the sample. We often see
samples of this length split into 6, 5, or even 4 sentences. Then we
need to split up longer sentences because the low sentence count/high
average sentence length is skewing the Fog score upward. But here we
have 118 words split into 9 sentences. This, paired with a fairly low
number of longer words, leaves us with the low Fog score we’re looking
for.
Comment:
Here's an edited version of the passage (some of the edits were to
eliminate duplicative material) that will reduce the Fog Index, by my
calculations, to 7.69: "The study found that instability rules, at least
at the beginning. Two-thirds of the children entering their first year
of middle school changed friends between the fall and the spring.
Juvonen suspects that has to do with the school system's structure.
Students arrive knowing a few other children from fifth grade. At the
start of the year, they stay close physically and emotionally to those
classmates. But as they settle into life at the new school, their social
horizons expand. They are drawn to those with like interests -- soccer,
theater, robotics. Similarities, as always, attract. Earlier friends
often fall by the wayside." --Don Tepper, editor, PT in Motion.
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