Assessing the readability of a Wired.com excerpt.

This month's Fog Index sample text comes from a November 24 Wired.com article ("This Stripped-Down Blogging Tool Exemplifies Antisocial Media" by Clive Thompson). Longer words are italicized.

"I call it antiviral design. Most platforms work in precisely the opposite fashion. They're casinos of quantification, designed to constantly tell us what's blowing up and what isn't. We peer at our feeble posts on Twitter or Instagram or LinkedIn and pray for likes, for hearts, for a big-smile emoji. Our attention is magnetically drawn to anything with a huge "share" number beneath it -- what psychologists call the social proof: If lots of people are paying attention to something, we figure it's worth our notice too."

Word count: 86 words
Average sentence length: 17 words (5, 8, 15, 22, 36)
Words with 3+ syllables: 13 percent (11/86 words)
Fog Index: (17+13) *.4 = 12 (12.0, no rounding)

We only need to cut one point from the Fog Index to fall within ideal range. There isn't much we would change about the writing itself, which is generally crisp and concise. So, in this case, we look to a simpler, more obvious fix: sentence length. At a glance, we see that the last sentence is significantly longer than the others. Let's see if a simple tweak does the trick:

"I call it antiviral design. Most platforms work in precisely the opposite fashion. They're casinos of quantification, designed to constantly tell us what's blowing up and what isn't. We peer at our feeble posts on Twitter or Instagram or LinkedIn and pray for likes, for hearts, for a big-smile emoji. Our attention is magnetically drawn to anything with a huge "share" number beneath it. Psychologists call this the social proof: If lots of people are paying attention to something, we figure it's worth our notice too."

Word count: 86 words
Average sentence length: 14 words (5, 8, 15, 22, 14, 22)
Words with 3+ syllables: 13 percent (11/86 words)
Fog Index: (14+13) *.4 = 10 (10.8, no rounding)

We got a lot of mileage out of our small edit to split up the last sentence. It cut our Fog Score by 2 points. The takeaway: When cutting through the Fog in your writing and editing endeavors, you don't need to start from scratch to make the text flow better. Sometimes, it takes only a few keystrokes to clean up your syntax and clarify your argument.

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