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The Fog Index

Posted on Sunday, February 28, 2016 at 3:54 PM

Assessing the readability of an excerpt from TheAtlantic.com.

This month's sample text comes from a February 22 article on TheAtlantic.com ("The Spider That Crawls the Dark Web Looking for Stolen Data" by Kaveh Waddel). Here's the excerpt, with longer words italicized:

"Hackers routinely make off with massive hauls of sensitive data by breaking into databases held by government agencies, retailers, hospitals, banks, and just about every other kind of organization. But most intrusions are discovered by a third party rather than the organization that actually lost the data, according to a 2014 report from Verizon. Some network tools detect intrusions, and scrutinizing detailed logs can reveal unauthorized access, but often, an organization won't realize what happened until after a security researcher or a journalist catches wind of the intrusion. If your TV is stolen, it's hard not to notice its conspicuous absence in the living room; if hackers nab data from a server, however, it's not nearly as obvious."

--Word count: 118 words
--Average sentence length: 30 words (29, 25, 34, 30)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 14 percent (17/118 words)
--Fog Index: (30+14)*.4 = 17 (17.6, no rounding)

We need to slash at least 6 points from the Fog Index to fall within ideal range. Our main problem is sentence length, which averages 30 words. Let's see if our edits will be enough to cut the Fog by over one third.

"Hackers routinely steal massive hauls of sensitive data by breaking into databases held by the government, retailers, hospitals, banks, and just about every other kind of organization. But most breaches are exposed by a third party rather than the organization that actually lost the data, according to a 2014 report from Verizon. Some network tools detect breaches, and scrutinizing detailed logs can reveal unauthorized access. But often an organization won't realize what happened until after a researcher or a journalist catches wind of it. If your TV is stolen, it's hard not to notice its conspicuous absence in the living room. If hackers nab data from a server, however, it's not nearly as blatant."

--Word count: 114 words
--Average sentence length: 19 words (27, 25, 13, 19, 17, 13)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 9 percent (10/114 words)
--Fog Index: (19+8)*.4 = 10 (10.8, no rounding)

Sometimes we can home in on one of the two culprits (sentence length or longer words) to cut the Fog. In this case, though, we had to address both to shave off enough points. Four sentences became six, and the percentage of longer words fell by 5 points. All this was enough to cut the needed 6 points from the original Fog Index.

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