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The Fog Index

Posted on Thursday, February 26, 2015 at 11:38 PM

Assessing the readability of a WashingtonPost.com excerpt.

This month, we examine the Fog Index of a passage from a February 24 WashingtonPost.com article ("How the FCC Could Use an Obscure Internet Power to Change the Pay-TV Market" by Brian Fung). Here's the sample:

"It's a complicated line of reasoning, so let's look at an example. Think of Google Fiber, which is trying to compete with large cable companies around the country. It has said that the biggest impediment to further network buildouts isn't the cost of infrastructure, or getting permission from cities to tear up streets. Instead, what holds Google back the most is having to pay programming networks for video content as part of the bundle it offers to consumers. Google Fiber has said that in some markets, it pays programmers twice what larger, more established cable companies pay for content."

--Word count: 99
--Average sentence length: 20 words (12, 16, 25, 25, 21)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 13 percent (13/99 words)
--Fog Index (20+13)*.4 = 13 (no rounding)

This excerpt comes close to meeting the Fog ideal -- i.e., a score below 12. There's no clear culprit here, so we will make minor tweaks to shave off a point or two off each element (sentence length and syllables).

"It's a complex line of reasoning, so let's look at an example. Think of Google Fiber, which is trying to compete with large cable companies around the country. It has said that the biggest roadblock to further network buildouts isn't the cost of infrastructure, or getting permission from cities to tear up streets. Instead, what holds Google back the most is having to pay programming networks for the video content offered to users in its bundle. Google Fiber has said that in some markets, it pays programmers twice what larger, more well-known cable companies pay for content."

--Word count: 97
--Average sentence length: 19 words (12, 16, 25, 23, 21)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 7 percent (7/97 words)
--Fog Index (19+7)*.4 = 10 (no rounding)

As expected, we didn't need to do much work here. By culling some longer words and tightening up just one of the longer sentences, we cut the Fog by 3 points. Editing further would have been unnecessary for our purposes. The author has done a good job of breaking up his tech commentary into readable parts.

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