Assessing the readability of a Wired.com excerpt.

This month's Fog sample text comes from a January 29 Wired.com article ("RIP Political Lawn Signs, Digital Ads Killed Them" by Issie Lapowsky). Here's the excerpt:

"Kimmel, for one, is worried about the impact this could have on voter turnout. After all, while targeting may be effective, it requires having a central database of people who ought to be targeted to begin with. That means those people have either signed up with a campaign on their own, voted in the past, or taken some kind of political action to get them on a list. Then, campaign's algorithms go to town determining who's most persuadable on that list, and positively bombard them with ads, emails, phone calls, and door knocks."

--Word count: 93 words
--Average sentence length: 23 words (14, 23, 31, 25)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 9 percent (8/93 words)
--Fog Index: (23+9)*.4 = 12 (12.8, no rounding)

We're pretty close to the mark here. All we need to do is shave one point off our score to land in ideal range. Let's see if a few light edits do the trick:

"Kimmel, for one, is worried about the impact this could have on voter turnout. After all, while targeting may be effective, it entails having a central database of people who ought to be targeted to begin with. That means those people have either signed up with a campaign on their own, voted in the past, or taken some kind of political action to get them on a list. The campaign's algorithms go to town determining who's most persuadable on that list. Then they bombard them with ads, emails, phone calls, and door knocks."

--Word count: 93 words
--Average sentence length: 19 words (14, 23, 31, 13, 12)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 6 percent (6/93 words)
--Fog Index: (19+6)*.4 = 10 (10.0, no rounding)

For the first time, the word count of our edited sample mirrors that of the unedited version. The writing is quite succinct, so there wasn't much fat for us to cut. Instead, we focused our attention on the last sentence, which was easily split in two. This alone cut our average sentence length by four points. Eliminating two longer words slashed 3 percent from that part of the equation. These modest edits got the job done; our final Fog score is two points less than the original.

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