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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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