There is a friend who sends me messages of heavy import everyday. He thinks them through, and has a serious tone. But the problem is, he is so ponderous, you have to decipher his message. I give you a message that I received:
*"The success of eminent people in society depends on their power of discrimination; they have to make right and quick decisions. Cultivate the discriminative intellect to achieve tremendous success in life. Discriminative faculty helps us to take right decisions, but it is the function of the determinative intellect to put them into practice without frequent changes of decisions or postponing actions. Cultivate the determinative intellect to execute plans and programmes"
I think the meaning of these messages are clear. But only after another reading.
Why am I quoting him? It is to bring to you the notion of Fog Index, which I read in that Charles Handy book.
Fog Index tells you how foggy a given text is.
To calculate the Fog Index, count all the words in a page and divide them by the number of full stops. This gives you an idea of how long your average sentence is. Then add one for every word above three syllable and one for every technical term. According to Handy, he averages eighteen, the Sun newspaper averages ten, The Economist averages thirty. Around twenty is optimum, esp if you are addressing a live audience.
The Fog Index of the text I have quoted is 25.5 by my reckoning.
There are many reasons for a text to be readable or not. But Fog Index is one of the easiest of the measures.
And, don't check the Fog Index of this post. I have kept my sentences short. Not a word above three syllables.
Interesting and apt label for assessing reading and difficulty difficulty. Earlier Microsoft Word used to provide information like average words per sentence. Then there is a software tool 'Bullfighter' that used to examine your work and provide a index similar to fox index. These tools are really helpful. When we type we first express ourselves. We must revisit to make it easy for readers.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely yes. If it is hard to understand, what is the use of writing or saying something?
ReplyDeleteI'm a Foggy...that's my function. Winter can't be Summer, Fog can't be sunshine...there are those who are simple clarity and there are those who are distilled and clarified.
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