Assessing the readability of a Wired.com excerpt.

This month's Fog Index sample text comes from an August 28 piece on Wired.com ("On Instagram, 'Unlink Account' Won't Unlink You from Facebook" by Paris Martineau. Here's the excerpt, with longer words italicized:

"Common sense suggests that if you unlink a Facebook account from your Instagram profile, you've unlinked that Facebook account from your Instagram profile. But like many things Facebook, common sense does not exactly apply here. Clicking Unlink Account does not actually unlink a Facebook account from Instagram, a Facebook spokesperson told WIRED, because it isn't possible to separate the two. Even if a user never explicitly linked their Facebook and Instagram profiles, they are intrinsically connected—Finstagrams be damned—and will continue to be, regardless of how many times you mash 'Unlink Account.'"

--Word count: 93 words
--Average sentence length: 37 words (23, 12, 25, 33)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 10 percent (9/93 words)
--Fog Index (37+10)* .4 = 18 (18.8, no rounding)

This is one of the higher Fog Index scores we've seen. At a glance, it doesn't seem all that "foggy." The number of longer words doesn't seem disproportionate. But when we look at sentence length, the problem comes into focus. The 93 words in this excerpt are divvied up into just 4 sentences, leaving us with a longer word percentage of 37. We need to pare this down if we want to cut at least 7 points from the current score.

"Common sense suggests that if you unlink a Facebook account from your Instagram profile, you've unlinked that Facebook account from your Instagram profile. But like many things Facebook, common sense does not exactly apply here. Clicking Unlink Account does not truly unlink a Facebook account from Instagram, a Facebook spokesperson told WIRED. It isn't possible to separate the two. Even if a user never explicitly linked their Facebook and Instagram profiles, they are intrinsically connected—Finstagrams be damned. And they will continue to be no matter how many times you mash 'Unlink Account.'"

--Word count: 93 words
--Average sentence length: 21 words (23, 12, 17, 7, 19, 15)
--Words with 3+ syllables: 8 percent (7/93 words)
--Fog Index (21+8)* .4 = 11 (11.6, no rounding)

In our edit, 4 sentences became 6, and we cut 2 points from the longer word percentage. Our changes were minor, and overall word count didn't change. The text needed the lightest of touches to make a big difference in the Fog Index. And that's the takeaway point from this month's column: You don't have to reinvent a piece of writing to clear it of fog. Small changes can skew the numbers in a big way.

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