Assessing the readability of a WashingtonPost.com excerpt.

This month's sample Fog Index text comes from a February 24 article WashingtonPost.com article ("Listen, Technology Holdouts: Enough Is Enough" by Larry Downes). Here's the text we're analyzing:

"To overcome the inertia of legacy customers, it may be appropriate for governments to step in. The United States has long had programs aimed at making broadband more affordable for lower-income Americans and more accessible for those living in sparsely populated areas. On Thursday, the FCC unanimously approved the allocation of up to $2 billion in additional taxpayer funds for rural broadband build-out in areas where private investment cannot be cost-justified. Total support for rural broadband could reach $20 billion over the next decade. (The devil, however, will be in the details. A government audit found that an earlier Agriculture Department effort to expand rural broadband wasted $3 billion of stimulus money.)"

--Word count: 112 words
--Average sentence length: 19 words (16, 26, 29, 13, 8, 20)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 15 percent (17/112 words)
--Fog Index: (19+14)*.4 = 13 (13.6, no rounding)

There isn't much Fog to cut through here, but we do want to shave 2 points from our score of 13. Let's try some modest edits to get where we want to go.

"To overcome the inertia of legacy customers, governments may need to step in. The United States has long had programs aimed at making broadband cheaper for lower-income Americans and more accessible for those living in more rural regions. On Thursday, the FCC unanimously approved up to $2 billion in additional taxpayer funds for rural broadband build-out in areas where private investment cannot be cost-justified. Total support for rural broadband could reach $20 billion over the next decade. (The devil, however, will be in the details. A government audit found that an earlier Agriculture Department effort to expand rural broadband wasted $3 billion of stimulus money.)"

--Word count: 105 words
--Average sentence length: 18 words (13, 25, 26, 13, 8, 20)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 11 percent (12/105 words)
--Fog Index: (18+11)*.4 = 11 (11.6, no rounding)

We weren't able to do much sentence shortening here. There were few logical places to split up longer sentences, so we did some minor trimming to cut overall word count by 7. This helped us shave 1 point from the average sentence length. The bulk of our efforts went toward reducing the number of longer words. We were able to cut this by 4 points, bringing the Fog Index within ideal range.

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