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:
- Take any passage of text that is around 100 words.
- Find the average sentence length by taking the number of words in the passage and divide by the number of sentences.
- 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.
- 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.
- Add the average sentence length and the percentage of complex words.
- 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.
- The passage contains 103 words and is 7 sentences long. 103 divided by 7 gives us an average sentence length of 14.7 words.
- It contains 16 complex words (in italics). 16 divided by 103 equals 0.155. Multiply that by 100 gives us 15.5% complex words
- Adding 14.7 (the average sentence length) to 15.5 (the percent of complex words) gives us 30.2.
- 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.
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