Assessing the readability of a Wired.com excerpt.

This month’s Fog Index text comes from a February 26 article on Wired.com (“The Next Generation of Batteries Could Be Built by Viruses” by Daniel Oberhaus). Here’s the excerpt , with longer words in italics:

“Nature has found plenty of ways to build useful structures out of inorganic materials without the help of viruses. Belcher’s favorite example is the abalone shell, which is highly structured at the nanoscale, lightweight, and sturdy. Over the process of tens of millions of years, the abalone evolved so that its DNA produces proteins that extract calcium molecules from the mineral-rich aquatic environment and deposit it in ordered layers on its body. The abalone never got around to building batteries, but Belcher realized this same fundamental process could be implemented in viruses to build useful materials for humans.”

--Word count: 98 words
--Average sentence length: 25 words (19, 17, 36, 26)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 18 percent (18/93 words)
--Fog Index (25+18)* .4 = 17 (17.2, no rounding)

The Fog Index of 17 is quite high, a full 6 points above an ideal score. The problem is twofold: there’s a high number of longer words, and we have 98 words split into just 4 sentences. Let’s see if we can rework the text to cut through some of the Fog.

“Nature has found plenty of ways to build useful structures out of inorganic substances without the help of viruses. Belcher’s favorite example is the abalone The sea snail’s shell is highly structured at the nanoscale, lightweight, and sturdy. Over tens of millions of years, the abalone evolved so that its DNA produces proteins that extract calcium molecules from the mineral-rich marine environment. Then they deposit them in ordered layers on its body. The abalone never got around to building batteries, but Belcher realized this same basic process could be applied to viruses to build useful resources for humans.”

--Word count: 95 words
--Average sentence length: 16 words (19, 6, 13, 24, 10, 26)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 13 percent (13/98 words)
--Fog Index (16+13)* .4 = 11 (11.6, no rounding)

We had our work cut out for us. The text presents important scientific facts that are tough to edit. Some longer words aren’t easily swapped or edited out because they encapsulate key ideas. But we were able to split up two of the longer sentences to bring down the sentence length by 9 points, which went a long way in cutting through the Fog.

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