Assessing the readability of an AdAge.com excerpt.

This month, we calculate the Fog Index of a December 19 AdAge.com excerpt ("New York Times Magazine to Undergo Three-Month Review" by Michael Sebastian). Here's the text:

"The Times Magazine is a staple of the paper's Sunday edition and a key asset in the war for circulation revenue, which surpassed ad revenue over a full year for the first time in 2012. Its mission and impact has become a little less clear over the years, however, as competition grew and the core paper itself became more analytical. Advertisers, meanwhile, have taken their dollars elsewhere, both online and to the paper's monthly fashion magazine T, which has proven to be a better fit for marketers from the still-strong fashion and luxury category."

--Word count: 94 words
--Average sentence length: 31 words (35, 25, 34)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 13 percent (12/94 words)
--Fog Index: (31+13)*.4 = 17 (no rounding)

This sample yields a Fog score of 17. The percentage of longer words is quite high, but sentence length is the main culprit here. We have nearly 100 words split into just three sentences. Let's see what we can do to bring the Fog Index below 12 to meet the Fog-Gunning ideal.

"The Times Magazine is a staple of the paper's Sunday edition and a key asset in the war for circulation profits, which surpassed ad profits over a full year for the first time in 2012. Its mission and impact have become a little less clear over the years, though. Competition has grown and the core paper itself has become more analytical. Advertisers, meanwhile, have taken their dollars elsewhere, both online and to the paper's monthly fashion magazine, T. The magazine has proven to be a better fit for marketers from the still-strong fashion and luxury category."

--Word count: 96 words
--Average sentence length: 19 words (35, 14, 12, 17, 18)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 7 percent (7/96 words)
--Fog Index: (19+7)*.4 = 10 (no rounding)

This sample didn't need much editing to clear up the fog. The word count increased slightly, but we were able to split 3 sentences into 5 and reduce the number of longer words by nearly half. This brought the Fog Index down by 7 points.

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