Use the Fog Index to determine readability

 

Use the Fog Index to determine readability

Many decades ago when I was writing and reading for Texas A&M's University Press, College of Science, and Department of Chemistry, I discovered the Fog Index. We did have a lot of winter fog in College Station, Texas, but the Fog Index has nothing to do with Mother and Father Nature.

Rather, the Fog Index measures the readability of text. It's actually the Gunning Fog Index, named after Robert Gunning who developed the readability test in 1952. It was updated by readability researchers in the early 1980s.

Generally, the Fog Index can tell you the average reading and comprehension level that is required of a person reading your text. It takes a little time to do it manually but, of course, computers have now come to our rescue.

Here are the steps just in case you want to do it yourself:

1. Select text that has about 100 words.
2. Determine the average sentence length by dividing the total number of words by the total number of sentences.
3. Count the number of complex words, those with three or more syllables. [To get even more accuracy, do not include proper nouns, familiar jargon, or compound (i.e., hyphenated) words, and do not include suffixes (-es, -ed, -ing, etc.) as a syllable. That will take more time, and I've found that generally it's not really necessary for our purposes in our blogs and marketing materials.] Divide the number of complex words by the total number of words and multiply by 100. That gives you the percentage of complex words.
4. Add the average sentence length and the percentage of complex words, and multiply that number by 0.4.
5. The resulting number tells you the grade level required to read and understand the text.

Surprisingly, our trusty computers indicate that the Wall Street Journal has a Fog Index of 11, meaning that you don't even have to be a high school graduate to read and understand its stories.

I did not determine the Fog Index for my post here. My friends say I'm a 10-year-old child trapped in a man's body, so I'll just presume that I wrote this at a fifth-grade level and that you can read and understand it. LOL. (That also explains why I can't read or understand the Wall Street Journal!)

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