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The Fog Index

Posted on Monday, January 30, 2012 at 7:35 PM

Assessing the readability of a Time.com excerpt.

This month, we calculate the Fog Index of an article from Time.com ("Four Industries Apple Can Disrupt in the Near Future," by Tim Bajarin).

"Imagine being able to just tell your TV, 'Find Big Bang Theory,' and it goes right to all available versions on broadcast, cable, your digital video recorder or online. Or ask it about a football player you just saw make a touchdown, and on the bottom of the screen it shows you his stats. Or if you want to find out about Yosemite, just ask Siri and it will find all related video and web content available and give you exact answers to your query on the TV. But perhaps its greatest feat will most likely be to instantly decipher the plethora of web-based video content that is online, and neatly show what is available for a given topic right on your TV screen."

--Word count: 124
--Average sentence length: 31 (29, 25, 34, 36)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 10 percent (13/124 words)
--Fog Index: (31+10)*.4 = 16 (no rounding)

In this case, the clear culprit is sentence length. While only 10 percent of the words in qualify as "long," the average sentence length is a hefty 31 words. Let's see if we can break this down into more manageable parts.

"Imagine telling your TV, 'Find Big Bang Theory,' and having it display all versions on cable, your DVR, or the Internet. Wondering about a football player you just saw make a touchdown? Ask your TV and get his stats at the bottom of your screen. Want to find out about Yosemite? Just ask Siri and it will find all related video and Web content and display the results on the TV. Most importantly, ITV will collect the plethora of online videos and show available content for a given topic right on your screen."

--Word count: 93
--Average sentence length: 16 words (21, 11, 13, 6, 20, 22)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 9 percent (8/93 words)
--Fog Index: (16+9)*.4 = 10 (no rounding)

The original contained unneeded words and consisted of just four sentences. We were able to turn four sentences into six and trim word count to bring our Fog score down by 7 points. Splitting up longer sentences improved not only the Fog score, but also the rhythm of the writing.

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