Gunning Fog Index

• Robert Gunning: The Technique of Clear

Writing: Mcgraw Hill, 1968. The American
businessman developed the Test in 1952.
• Test designed to measure the readability of a
sample of English writing. The resulting number
is a rough estimate of the number of years of
formal education that a person requires in order
to understand the text on a first reading.
• Fog Index = 12. 18 Year old high school senior
in the US.
 Index
• Texts designed for a wide audience generally require <12
index.
• Close to universal understanding <8
• Calculated on the following algorithm:
1.Take a full passage of about 100 words.
2. Find the average sentence length(No. of words by no, of
sentences).
3. Count words with 3 or more syllables(vowel sound), eg pen
has one, attack 2, sentence 2( sen & tence, not ce as no
separate sound from tence), average 2; excluding proper
nouns, familiar jargon, compound words, or common suffixes
such as -es,-ed, -ing.
4. Add the average sentence length and the percentage of
complex words(those found it in 3).
5. Multiply the result by 0.4 to get the Index,
 Formula
• 0.4 ((words/sentences)+100(complex
words/total words))
• Good indication of reading difficulty, but
not always: a 4 syllable word may be easy.
• Till 1980s, differently calculated, with
independent clauses counted as
sentences.
 Examples
• Rock-a-bye baby, on the treetop./when the wind blows, the cradle
will rock./when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall./And down will
come baby, cradle and all.
• The word logorrohea is often used pejoratively to describe prose
that is highly abstract and contains little concrete language. Since
abstract writing is haerd to visualize, it often seems as though it
makes no sense and all the words are excessive. Writers in
academic fields that concern themselves mostly with the abstract,
such as philosophy and especially postmodernism, often fail to
include extensive concrete examples of their ideas, and so a
superficial examination of their work might lead one to believe that it
is all nonsense.
• 31 words in 4 sentences.No complex
words. Fog Index 3.1
• 86 in 3.11 compex. 16.6