Assessing the readability of a TheAtlantic.com excerpt.

This month's Fog Index sample text comes from a June 26 article on TheAtlantic.com ("RIP Gchat" by Colleen Rothman). Here is the text we're analyzing:

"Reading email exchanges from past relationships that soured is awkward enough. But it's the old Gchats, conducted in close to real time, that transport me to the past, revealing thoughts I don't remember having in conversations with people I no longer speak to, people who at the time I could never imagine not knowing. There they are, in stark black sans-serif: my overabundant exclamation points, my unsuccessful attempts at sarcasm, my bad jokes, or worse, responding "lol" to misogynistic ones. All preserved in digital amber, like the insect from Jurassic Park. And just like in the movie, when the past is within such close reach, I can't leave it alone."

Word count: 110 words
Average sentence length: 22 words (11, 43, 26, 11, 19)
Words with 3+ syllables: 8 percent (9/110 words)
Fog Index: (22+8)*.4 = 12 (12.0, no rounding)

Here we have a conversational retrospective on Gchat. The text reads easily and doesn't burden itself with dense words. Still, the Fog Index weighs in at 12, and our goal is to fall below 12 on the index. Let's see what we can do to reduce our score by at least 1 point:

"Reading email exchanges from past relationships that soured is awkward enough. But it's the old Gchats, conducted in close to real time, that transport me to the past. They reveal thoughts I don't remember having in conversations with people I no longer speak to, people who at the time I could never imagine not knowing. There they are, in stark black sans-serif: my overabundant exclamation points, my failed attempts at sarcasm, my bad jokes, or worse, responding "lol" to misogynistic ones. All preserved in digital amber, like the insect from Jurassic Park. And just like in the movie, when the past is within such close reach, I can't leave it alone."

Word count: 111 words
Average sentence length: 19 words (11, 17, 27, 26, 11, 19)
Words with 3+ syllables: 7 percent (8/111 words)
Fog Index: (19+7)*.4 = 10 (10.4, no rounding)

We didn't do much here. We swapped out one longer word ("unsuccessful") for a shorter one ("failed") to bring down the percentage of longer words. Then we split up the unwieldy 43-word sentence from the original into two sentences, which made all the difference in our final score. These two modest changes cut the Fog by 2 points.

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