Assessing the readability of a Buzzfeed.com excerpt.

This month, we'll calculate the Fog Index of an excerpt from Buzzfeed.com ("Facebook Reveals the Secrets Behind 'M,' Its Artificial Intelligence Bot" by Alex Kantrowitz). Here's the sample, with longer words italicized:

"Marcus isn't kidding about the breakthroughs. The field of artificial intelligence has experienced periods of dramatic slowdown, known as 'AI winters,' with the most recent dark period occurring in the early 2000s. These slowdowns, largely the result of lost faith in the technology's ability to back up its researchers' claims, set the field back more than once, costing it years of funding and human power. But the past decade is widely seen as a comeback period for AI. Which is why something like M, for the first time, actually seems realistic. And it's worth noting that virtual reality, which not long ago seemed out of reach, has gone through similar fits and starts but is now beginning to see widespread deployment."

--Word count: 121 words
--Average sentence length: 20 words (6, 26, 33, 13, 13, 30)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 13 percent (16/121 words)
--Fog Index: (20+13)*.4 = 13 (13.2, no rounding)

Neither the average sentence length nor the percentage of longer words is a clear culprit here. We'll want to make modest changes throughout the sample to shave off two or more points from the existing score of 13.

"Marcus isn't kidding about the breakthroughs. The field of artificial intelligence has seen periods of marked slowdown, known as 'AI winters.' The most recent winter occurred in the early 2000s. These slowdowns, largely the result of lost faith in the technology's ability to back up its researchers' claims, set the field back more than once, costing it years of funding and human power. But the past decade is widely seen as a comeback era for AI. Which is why something like M, for the first time, seems realistic. And it's worth noting that virtual reality, which not long ago seemed out of reach, has gone through similar fits and starts but is now beginning to see widespread deployment."

--Word count: 118 words
--Average sentence length: 17 words (6, 15, 9, 33, 13, 12, 30)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 9 percent (11/118 words)
--Fog Index: (17+9)*.4 = 10 (10.4, no rounding)

Because there wasn't a clear culprit, we addressed both sentence length and word choice in our minor edits. In doing so, we cut 3 words from our average sentence length and 4 percent from the longer word percentage. Total word count remained mostly static, with just three words culled in the edit. These modest changes brought down our Fog score from 13 to 10, a reduction of nearly one quarter.

Add your comment.