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The Fog Index

Posted on Thursday, March 29, 2018 at 12:19 AM

Assessing the readability of a Mashable.com excerpt.

This month, we've taken our sample text from a March 18 Mashable.com article ("If We Want to Solve Tech's Talent Crisis, We Need to Change How We Hire" by Chatelle Lynch). Here's the excerpt, with longer words italicized:

"These numbers tell us that the technology industry doesn't reflect the communities in which we live. What may be less obvious, though, is that this lack of diverse thought hurts our industry in many subtle ways. When we're surrounded by people with different experiences -- whether that's because of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability, or education -- our brains do something incredible. Research has shown that social diversity enhances creativity by encouraging us to uncover new information and perspectives, leading to better decision making, problem solving, and innovation -- all of which are critical to our industry's success."

Word count: 96 words
Average sentence length: 24 words (16, 20, 25, 35)
Words with 3+ syllables: 23 percent (22/96 words)
Fog Index: (24 +23) *.4 = 18 (18.8, no rounding)

Sentence length and longer words share the blame here for the inflated Fog score. In this 96-word sample, we have 22 words with 3 or more syllables -- nearly a quarter of the total word count. Still, because this article focuses on technology, there's only so much we can do to cut down on longer words. So we'll have to take a two-pronged approach.

"These numbers tell us that the tech industry doesn't reflect the communities in which we live. What may be less clear, though, is that this lack of diverse thought hurts our field in many subtle ways. When we're surrounded by people whose race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability, or education differ from ours, our brains do something amazing. Research has shown that social diversity enhances creativity. It inspires us to unearth new information and viewpoints. This leads to better decision making, problem solving, and innovation. All of these things are crucial to our industry's success."

Word count: 95 words
Average sentence length: 14 words (16, 20, 22, 8, 9, 10, 10)
Words with 3+ syllables: 14 percent (13/95 words)
Fog Index: (14+14) *.4 = 11(11.2, no rounding)

Our approach worked. We whittled away at the number of longer words, which got us part of the way there. Then we looked at which sentences might be split up into two sentences. This yielded the biggest results; by turning 4 sentences into 7, we were able to shave off several additional points.

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