Assessing the readability of a BonAppetit.com excerpt.

This month's Fog Index excerpt comes from a July 29 BonAppetit.com article ("How to Cook Fish [Without Stinking Up Your Kitchen or Splattering Oil Everywhere]" by Molly Baz). Here's the sample text, with longer words italicized:

"Roasting fillets of firm white fish (think cod, halibut, hake, or haddock) in the oven at a low temperature is hands-down the most approachable at-home fish cooking method there is. You avoid all of the sputtering and splattering (and potential smelliness) of high heat stovetop searing, and cooking the fish gently means you have a greater margin of error -- and still takes less than half an hour. Fish cooked this way isn't going to take on any color, so the only way to really tell if it's done is by touching it; the flesh should flake easily under light pressure, and should look just barely opaque. And while that spiced chickpea-carrot mixture makes this dish a complete meal, you can cook your fish on top of just about any side dish you like and keep the method the same."

--Word count: 139 words
--Average sentence length: 35 words (30, 37, 39, 33)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 4 percent (6/139 words)
--Fog Index (35 +4)*.4 = 15 (15.6, no rounding)

We have two extremes here: high average sentence length and a very low percentage of longer words. The latter helps keep the Fog Index within 4 points of our goal (below 12). How can we edit this passage to improve our score?

"Roasting fillets of firm white fish (think cod, halibut, hake, or haddock) in the oven at a low temperature is hands down the most approachable at-home fish cooking method there is. You avoid all of the sputtering and splattering (and potential smelliness) of high heat stovetop searing, and cooking the fish gently means you have a greater margin of error. And it still takes less than half an hour. Fish cooked this way isn't going to take on any color, so the only way to really tell if it's done is by touching it. The flesh should flake easily under light pressure and should look just barely opaque. And while that spiced chickpea-carrot mixture makes this dish a complete meal, you can cook your fish on top of just about any side dish you like and keep the method the same."

--Word count: 141 words
--Average sentence length: 24 words (31, 29, 9, 25, 14, 33)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 4 percent (6/141 words)
--Fog Index (24+4)*.4 = 11 (11.2, no rounding)

This was a pretty easy sample to edit. With such a low percentage of longer words right off the bat, we focused strictly on sentence length. Note that we gained 2 words in the editing: We removed the hyphen from "hands down" in keeping with Merriam-Webster's spelling. We gained the other word when we split up the second sentence. Really, all it took was a few nearly imperceptible sleights of hand to cut through the Fog. The sample we're left with is nearly identical to the original -- but 4 points lighter.

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