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After my disturbing discovery [Hake (2005)] that a paragraph of mine
had pathologically high GUnning Fog Index (GUFI) of 25.2, evidently
meaning that it was beyond the comprehension of most people, I asked
Goggle for some help on the meaning of GUFI. Here's part of what I
found:
According to a Wikipedia (2005) entry at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_Index> [bracketed by lines
"WiWiWiWiWiW. . .; my CAPS and inserts at ". . .[insert]. . . ."]:
WiWiWiWiWiWWiWiWiWiWiWWiWiWiWiWiWWiWiWiWiWiWi
In linguistics, the Gunning Fog Index is a test designed to measure
the readability of a sample of English text. The resulting number is
an indication of the number of years of formal education that a
person requires in order to easily understand the text on the first
reading. So if a passage has a fog index of 12, it has the reading
level of a U.S. high school senior. The test was developed by. . .
[the late]. . . Robert Gunning. . . [1964, 1968]. . ., professor of
English at Oxford University. The fog index is generally used by
people who want their writing to be read easily by a large segment of
the population. Texts that are designed for a wide audience generally
require a fog index of less than 12.
The Gunning-Fog index can be calculated with the following algorithm:
1. Take a full passage that is around 100 words (do not omit any
sentences). . . [too vague and restrictive - see the sentence under
the GUFI equation below]. . .
2. Find the average sentence length (divide the number of words by
the number of sentences).
3. Count words with three or more syllables (complex words), not
including proper nouns (for example, Djibouti), compound words, or
common suffixes such as -es, -ed, or -ing as a syllable, or familiar
jargon.
4. Add the average sentence length and the percentage of complex
words (ex., +13.37%, not simply + .1337). . . [too vague - see the
GUFI equation below].
5. Multiply the result by 0.4.
The complete formula. . . [for the GUnning Fog Index [GUFI)]. . . is
as follows. . . [incorrect mathematical notation corrected by Hake
using the standard brackets within brackets notation { [ ( ) ] } (the
outer bracket may not show up in ASCII) ]. . . :
GUFI = {(words/sentence) + [100 x (complex words/words)]} x 0.4
The formula can be easily modified to produce a [GUFI] with any
length sample. Simply multiply the standard result by 100/(words in
sample).. . .[That's a relief - my GUFI, corrected for the fact that
my sample length was 220 words, drops to a semi-respectable 27.2 x
0.45 = 12.2].
While the index is a good indication of reading difficulty . . .[but
see Weeks (2005]. . ., it still has flaws. Not all multisyllabic
words are difficult. For example, the word spontaneous is generally
not considered to be a difficult word, even though it has four
syllables.
WiWiWiWiWiWWiWiWiWiWiWWiWiWiWiWiWWiWiWiWiWiWi
The perceptive Linton Weeks (2005) in his Washington Post report
"Amazon's Vital Statistics Show How Books Stack Up," gives us the
*real* word on GUFI [bracketed by lines "WeWeWeWeWe. . . ."; my CAPS]:
WeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWe
Hey! Remember books? Sure you do. Your parents read them. So did
*their* parents. Now for all those folks who like to talk about books
without actually reading them, some exciting news! Amazon.com, the
pack-leading online superstore, has figured out an innovative, and
some would say insidious, way to talk about books.
Text Stats.
It's part of the company's ingenious "Search Inside" capability,
which allows you to comb through the entire text of a book online.
Sure, "Search Inside" has been around for a couple of years and, by
looking at the first few pages of a book that uses the feature, you
can get to know a little about it before you buy.
But with the addition in April of Text Stats, "Search Inside" now
takes books completely apart. It slices! It dices! IT CAN
UNCOMPLICATE COMEDIES, TRIVIALIZE TRAGEDIES, DIMINISH LEGITIMATE
DISCOURSE AND COMPLETELY HUMILIATE THE HUMANITIES!
Through Text Stats you can know such arcane things as the SIPs, or
Statistically Improbable Phrases, that appear in a book. The strange
pairing "reindeer socks," for instance, shows up four times in Eric
Jerome Dickey's "Naughty or Nice." Text Stats will also tell you the
number of characters (letters, not protagonists) in a book and the
relative "complexity" of the words. It ranks works according to
difficulty. Three different computer-driven indexes suggest whether a
book is easier -- or harder -- to read than others.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But now, with Text Stats, you can reduce your decision to utter
absurdity. YOU CAN LEARN, FOR EXAMPLE, WHICH BOOK SCORES HIGHER ON
WHAT IS KNOWN AS THE FOG INDEX. Conceived by the late Robert Gunning,
an English professor at Oxford University, the index states the
number of years of formal education you should have in order to read
and comprehend a random passage.
Here's how the index works: It picks a sample -- of 120 words or so
-- from the text.. . .[well, not quite - according to Wikipedia, one
can pick *any* sample of 100 words or over provided Wikipeia's
equation for GUFI (see above) is multiplied by the factor [100/(words
in sample)]. . . It finds the average number of words per sentence,
then picks up all the words in the sample that contain three or more
syllables. Compound words are ignored; so are verbs that become
polysyllabic through tense endings. The first word of each sentence
is tossed out, so are proper nouns. Then it takes the polysyllable
count, adds it to the average number of words in a sentence,
multiplies that number by 0.4 and, voila! The answer is a number that
supposedly represents a comprehension grade level.
The Fog Index shows that you should read at a seventh-grade level to
digest "Kite Runner" and at ninth-grade level for "Curious Incident."
The first novel contains 6 percent complex words, meaning three or
more syllables. Five percent of the words in "Curious Incident" are
considered complex. There is an average of 1.4 syllables per word in
both books.
At 11,702 words per dollar, "Kite Runner" is obviously a better
bargain than "Curious Incident," which contains only 6,156 WPD. That
is, unless the words in "Curious Incident" are more meaningful,
poetic or carefully chosen.
Text Stats still has a few kinks in its system. ACCORDING TO THE FOG
INDEX, A SIMPLE CHILD'S BOOK SUCH AS "THE RUNAWAY BUNNY" REQUIRES
SEVENTH-GRADE READING PROFICIENCY. And James Joyce's "Ulysses" is
said to be easier than 80 percent of other indexed books.
But in its pure form, TEXT STATS IS A TRIUMPH OF TRIVIALIZATION. By
squeezing all the life and loveliness out of poetry and prose, the
computer succeeds in numbing with numbers. IT'S THE TOTAL
DISASSEMBLING OF TRUTH, BEAUTY AND THE MYSTERIOUS MEANING OF WORDS.
Except for the Concordance feature, which arranges the 100 most used
words in the book into a kind of refrigerator-magnet poetry game.
Here's a poem made from the Concordance of Dave Ramsey's "Total Money
Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness": Emergency. Find first
friend. Give kids life. Live myth.
Yes, you heard right: This site is under deconstruction.
Authors! Imagine how Text Stats will help you write books that are,
if not better, at least easier to read according to the Fog Index and
that offer the reader more words per pound than "Moby-Dick."
Publishers! Who needs editors anymore? If the software can find SIPs,
surely it can be programmed to ferret out PCSs (Poorly Constructed
Sentences), ORDs (overly romantic drivelings) and DIPs (Dreadfully
Implausible Plots).
And readers! You can settle bar bets. Yes, "Ulysses" by James Joyce
(9 on the Fog Index) is more complicated than William Faulkner's "The
Sound and the Fury" (5.7 on the Fog Index). Yes, Charlotte Bronte
provides more words per ounce (13,959 in "Shirley") than her sister
Emily (10,444 in "Wuthering Heights"). And, yes, Ernest Hemingway
used fewer complex words (5 percent) in his short stories than F.
Scott Fitzgerald (9 percent).
That's right! Now you too can sound like a literary insider at
Washington cocktail parties. You can throw around statistics and make
clever conversation about the hard history books, the long-winded
novels, even those thick, heavy, make-you-think philosophy tomes that
contain really, really long words. And the beauty of it is, with
Amazon's "Search Inside" Text Stats and other features, you won't
even have to read them.
WeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWeWe
As far as writing goes, I think I'll ignore GUFI and stick with
Strunk & White [now Strunk et al. (2005)] and the venerable AIP Style
Manual (1997).
REFERENCES
AIP. 1997. "AIP Style Manual." American Institute of Physics, 4th
edition, online at
<http://www.aip.org/pubservs/style/4thed/toc.html>. Especially Sect.
2 "Preparing a scientific paper for publication."