Are You Overlooking this Simple Readability Tool?

Do you want to improve your chances of receiving an acceptance letter instead of a form rejection in response to your query letters? Of course you do …

How? Simply mirror the readability of the magazines that you’re submitting queries to.

Developed by Robert Gunning, an American businessman, the Gunning-Fog Index is one of the methods used to measure the readability of a passage of English text. The resulting number is an indication of the number of years of formal education that a person needs to easily understand the text on the first reading. For instance, if a passage of text has a Gunning-Fog Index of 12, it has the reading level of a U.S. high school senior, an 8 would indicate that a U.S. 8th grader could easily understand the passage.

Writers and editors who want their articles, stories or essays to be easily understood by a large segment of the population commonly use the Gunning-Fog Index. Texts that are designed for a wide audience generally require a Gunning-Fog Index below 12.

Typical Gunning-Fog Indices of some popular magazines:

12 — Atlantic Monthly
11 — TIME
10 — Newsweek
9 — Reader’s Digest
8 — Ladies’ Home Journal
7 — True Confessions
6 — Comic books

Calculating the Gunning-Fog Index

The Gunning-Fog Index is calculated in the following way:

  1. Take any passage of text that is around 100 words.
  2. Find the average sentence length by taking the number of words in the passage and divide by the number of sentences.
  3. Count the number of complex words, words with three or more syllables, within the passage. Do not include proper nouns (for example, Ravikant), compound words or common suffixes such as -es, -ed, or -ing as a syllable, or familiar jargon.
  4. Divide the number of complex words by the number of words in the passage and multiply by 100. This will give you the percentage of complex words. For example, 8.3%, not .083.
  5. Add the average sentence length and the percentage of complex words.
  6. Multiply the result by 0.4. This result is your Gunning-Fog Index, your readability.

While the index is a good indication of reading difficulty, it still has limitations. Not all multi-syllabic words are difficult. For example, the word “engineer ” is generally not considered to be a difficult word, even though it has three syllables.

While I can’t guarantee that by simply matching your article’s Gunning-Fog Index to that of the magazine you’re querying will result in an acceptance letter. I do feel confident saying that if you thoroughly analyze your magazine market, including its Gunning-Fog Index, you’ll begin to receive more acceptances than rejections.

Here’s an example. This passage of text is from an article that ran in INC. MAGAZINE, March 2008:

LIKE so MANY technology entrepreneurs, Williams, whose friends call him Ev, is a software engineer. But unlike many of the most successful, he’s no genius when it comes to programming. His specialty is taking a tiny, almost nonsensical idea and turning it into a cultural phenomenon. “He’s like a master craftsman,” says Naval Ravikant, a serial entrepreneur who is an angel investor in Twitter. “There are entrepreneurs who are financial geniuses, and there are raw coders. Evan is the master of creating a product where there wasn’t one before.” If Williams’s art is the conception of inconceivable products, then Twitter is his chef-d’oeuvre.

  1. The passage contains 103 words and is 7 sentences long. 103 divided by 7 gives us an average sentence length of 14.7 words.
  2. It contains 16 complex words (in italics). 16 divided by 103 equals 0.155. Multiply that by 100 gives us 15.5% complex words
  3. Adding 14.7 (the average sentence length) to 15.5 (the percent of complex words) gives us 30.2.
  4. Multiply 30.2 time 0.4(constant) gives us 12.08, or a 12 grade reading level.

Simple, once you’ve calculated a few.

So, the next time that you’re sending out a query, match the text of your letter with your magazine market and let me know when you get your acceptance letter. I’ll be cheering for you!

Until next time …

No day without a line.

March 26, 2008 · Filed Under Query Letters, Writing Tips

Comments

2 Responses to “Are You Overlooking this Simple Readability Tool?”

  1. Stu on March 26th, 2008 11:32 pm

    Bill,

    Great post, great site.

    I wasn’t aware of this, although it makes perfect sense. The complexities must get a bit mind boggling. In fact, you entire site has opened up my mind to new and exciting places :).

    Stu’s last blog post..A Single Name Across The Web (Project Dimes)

  2. Justin Kownacki on April 14th, 2008 5:31 am

    Good tip, and an interesting way to break down reading levels, but (as you said) there are always variables and limitations.

    For example, foreign words should count for more than complex English words, shouldn’t they?

    Redundant words (in your Inc. example, “entrepreneur” appears three times) shouldn’t count each time, should they?

    Perhaps more important than matching the estimated reading level of a publication is asking the (rhetorical?) question, Why are the estimated comprehension standards so low across the board? If 16 complex words in a 103-word passage equals a 12th grade reading level, I shudder to think how we’ll continue to communicate clearly and vibrantly while our education system drowns in an abyss of mediocrity…

    (And now, having thoroughly depressed the readers, I’ll agree that matching a publication’s reading level is likely a good idea for aspiring freelancers. However, if you can help them nudge the bar northward while you’re at it, more power to you.)

    Justin Kownacki’s last blog post..STBD1 Episode 01 - Jack’s Back

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