Assessing the readability of a PC World excerpt.

This month, we assess the readability of an article from PC World, posted on July 14, 2010 ("Consumer Reports Blasts Apple Over iPhone 4 -- Again," by Ian Paul):

"It's unclear whether Apple will need to do more to ally [sic] concerns and stop the blowback against the company over the antenna issue. The company hasn't issued any public statements since announcing the impending iPhone 4 software fix to change the signal reception display, and there is some debate about whether the fix will truly solve the problem. 'It remains to be seen if fixing metering inaccuracies will address the problem of dropped calls,' Consumer Reports said in its recent blog post."

--Word count: 83
--Average sentence length: 28 words (24, 35, 24)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 10 percent (8/83 words)
--Fog Index: (28+10) x .4 = 15 (no rounding)

Notice the spelling error in the first sentence -- likely a simple typo, but worth a mention. We published an article in March that, in part, explores online editing standards. Nearly half of the publications surveyed for a Columbia Journalism Review study were laxer about copyediting online. Perhaps this error supports the CJR data.

In the PC World passage, the clear culprit is sentence length. This is a tough passage to fix, as the last sentence contains quoted material and attribution. So how can we work around this and improve the Fog score?

"Will Apple need to do more to allay concerns and stop the backlash over the antenna issue? It's unclear. The company hasn't issued any public statements since announcing the iPhone 4 software fix to change the signal reception display. There is some debate about whether the fix will truly solve the problem. 'It remains to be seen if fixing metering inaccuracies will address the problem of dropped calls,' Consumer Reports said in its recent blog post."

--Word count: 76
--Average sentence length: 15 (17, 2, 20, 14, 24)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 8 percent (6/76 words)
--Fog Index: (15+8) x .4 = 9 (no rounding)

Reducing our Fog score by six points was, in this case, a simple matter of splitting up longer sentences. We also did some minor trimming to bring down the word count.

It can be a challenge to replace longer words in a tech article like this, especially when quoted matter is involved. Sometimes, there is no substitute for a longer word, especially when using industry lingo. When that happens, check your sentence length and word count. Make cuts where you can. Divide sentences when possible. Your readers will thank you for it.

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