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The Fog Index

Posted on Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 10:59 PM

Assessing the readability of a New York Times excerpt.

This month, we calculate the Fog Index of a national health briefing from the January 25, 2013, print and online editions of the New York Times ("More Evidence of a Severe Flu Season," by Donald G. McNeil Jr.). Here's the text:

"Death rates from flu and pneumonia have soared well above those of the last few years, confirming that this will be a fairly severe flu season, figures released Friday by federal health officials show. At the same time, new infections with influenza continued to fall, suggesting that the season has peaked almost everywhere in the country except in the far West. Because so many of those hospitalized and dying from the flu are geriatric patients, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidelines to doctors who care for older patients, suggesting giving high-dose flu shots to the elderly and starting antiflu drugs as soon as an infection is suspected."

--Word count: 110 words
--Average sentence length: 37 words (34, 27, 49)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 11 percent (12/110 words)
--Fog Index: (37+11)*.4 = 19 (no rounding)

The Fog score for this briefing is quite high. The clear culprit here is average sentence length. The 110 words are split into just three sentences, the last of which contains a hefty 49 words. Let's see what we can do to create shorter, easier-to-read sentences.

"Flu and pneumonia death rates have soared well above those of the last few years. Figures released Friday by federal health officials show that this will be a fairly severe flu season. At the same time, new flu cases are still falling. This suggests that the season has peaked almost everywhere in the country but the far west. Because many hospitalized and dying flu patients are elderly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that doctors give older patients high-dose flu shots and start antiflu drugs as soon as they suspect infection."

--Word count: 93 words
--Average sentence length: 19 words (15, 17, 10, 16, 37)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 9 percent (9/95 words)
--Fog Index: (19+9)*.4 = 11 (no rounding)

We had to wrestle with this sample a bit to bring its Fog index below 12. A health briefing contains vital information, so it requires a careful edit. We had to trim word count and split up longer sentences without cutting important details. In the end, we were able to cut average sentence length from 37 to 19 words, nearly in half.

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