Assessing the readability of sample text from TheAtlantic.com.

This month's Fog Index excerpt comes from a January 24 article on TheAtlantic.com ("What Do You Mean by 'The Media?'" by James Hamblin). Here's the text we're analyzing:

"The term 'the media' was first used as a singular, collective noun around 100 years ago, meaning 'an intervening agency, means, or instrument.' The instrument (or medium) of the time was the printing press. People in the business of operating printing presses were a distinct group. Now mediums abound -- many like Twitter and Facebook are still known as social media, even though the platforms have faded toward something closer to personal printing presses. At the same time, traditional media institutions are publishing on these platforms -- and others like Medium and YouTube -- alongside non-journalists. Everyone plays a role as an intermediary to some degree, an intervening agent in each news story, choosing what to share and how to frame it. As the term was originally conceived, many people would now qualify as part of 'the media.'"

(Note: We did not italicize longer words as we normally do because the sample itself contained an italicized phrase.)

--Word count: 135 words
--Average sentence length: 23 words (23, 11, 39, 20, 26, 16)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 16 percent (21/135 words)
--Fog Index: (23+16)*.4 = 15 (15.6, no rounding)

Both sentence length and number of longer words play a role in the elevated score of 15. Let's see if our modifications can bring us below 12.

"The term 'the media' was first used as a singular, collective noun around 100 years ago. It means 'an intervening agency, means, or instrument.' The instrument (or medium) of the time was the printing press. People in the business of running printing presses were a distinct group. Now mediums abound. Many like Twitter and Facebook are still known as social media, even though the platforms have become more like personal printing presses. At the same time, traditional media institutions are publishing on these platforms -- and others like Medium and YouTube -- alongside non-journalists. Everyone functions as an intermediary to some degree, an intervening agent in each news story, choosing what to share and how to frame it. As the term was first conceived, many people would now qualify as part of 'the media.'"

--Word count: words
--Average sentence length: 15 words (16, 8, 11, 12, 3, 22, 20, 24, 16)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 14 percent (19/132 words)
--Fog Index: (15+14)*.4 = 11 (11.6, no rounding)

There are a lot of three-syllable media terms here that would be hard to replace. Instead we focused our efforts on reducing the average sentence length. A few minor changes yielded dramatic results. The original 6 sentences became 9, cutting 8 points from the average length. We also gained ground by eliminating 2 of the longer words. All this brought the Fog Score down from 15 to 11.

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