 |
||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|||
Cutting the fog
Are you writing above your readers' heads? by Paul Paquet In the 1940s, educators began researching how the complexity of someone's
writing affects how much of that text the reader understands. Out of that research came the Fog Index, a handy tool for determining the reading level of a given piece of text. Here's how it works.
1) Take a sample of 100 words. 2) Divide the number of words by the number of sentences to determine the average sentence length. For example, a 100-word sample with eight sentences has an average sentence length of
12.5 words. 3) Count the number of words with three syllables or more. Don't include the names of people or places, or words that are actually made up of two shorter words (such as "near-sighted"), or verbs
whose third syllable is "-es" or "-ed." 4) Add together the numbers from Step 2 and Step 3. So if you had an average sentence length of 12.5 words and eight words of three or more syllables, your
total is 20.5. 5) Take the number from Step 4 and multiply it by 0.4. In our example, 20.5 multiplied by 0.4 gives you 8.2. 6) Lop off any decimals. The number left behind is the grade level a reader must read at to
understand your work. So in our example, 8.2 becomes 8, meaning that the reader needs a Grade 8 education to understand your message. 7) The maximum reading level is 17, although if you have written something so
frightfully horrible that it has a "Grade 17" reading level, you really ought to go back to the drawing board.
Cornerstone is a writing and editing firm that uses marketing and PR principles to create "words you can build your business on." Call us from anywhere in the world for rush work.
|
|||