Activity 8.1, Measurement Difficulties and Indexes
no need to turn-in, although you will be responsible for this material

In Topic 8, you read about several indexes that are used to measure complex quantities that are not defined and measured easily.  In this activity, you will work with one of those indexes, the Fog Index, which measures reading difficuly.  You will analyze different reading passages to get a better sense of how the different components affect the result, and why this index gives a measurement of a text’s reading difficulty.

1.  Consider the property of “reading difficulty of a passage of test.”  For the most part, we can probably agree that such a property exists: some passages of text are certainly easier to read than others.  But how might you measure this property, and list three factors that might go into measuring a passage’s reading difficulty.

You are asked to find two brief (between three to five sentences) passages of text on the web, of varying degrees of difficulty.

2.  Copy and paste your first passage into your MS Word document, along with it's URL.

3.  Copy and paste your second passage into your MS Word document, along with it's URL.

4. Which of your two passages do you think is most difficult to read?

5.  Because longer sentences tend to be more difficult to read than shorter ones, the number of words per sentence in a passage of text would seem to be a reasonable measure of reading difficulty.

In MS Word, it is fairly easy to find the word count on a selection of text.  The status bar displays the number of words in the selection. For example, 100/1440 means that the selection accounts for 100 words of the total number of words in the document, 1,440.

Once you have determined the word count for each passage, set up a table on an Excel spreadsheet, like the one shown here, and record the number of words and the number of sentences for each of the three passages.  Then use the appropriate formula in Excel use to compute the number of words per sentence.  Copy and paste your table into your MS Word document when you are done.

Passage Number of Words Number of Sentences Words per Sentence
1      
2      

5.  Based on “words per sentence,” which of your passages is the most difficult to read?

6.  Another measure of reading difficulty might be the number of “big” words in a passage of text.  Count the number of “big” words, using the definition of “big” we discussed in class:

words with three or more syllables, except proper names, and compound words formed from easy words (like "everything"), formed from a suffix (such as "ed" or "ing"), or connected with a hyphen.

How many “big” words (as defined above) did each passage have?  Give a list of the “big” words in each.  If a word occurs more than once, you need to count it each time, but just list it once.

7.  Here you will add two columns (to the right of your “Words per Sentence” column) to your spreadsheet.  The first new column will be “Number of Big Words,” and you can fill this by entering the number of “big” words you found for each passage in question #6.  The second new column will be labeled “Percentage of Big Words,” and calculate the percentage of big words per passage, which is:
Number of big words / Total number of words .
Copy and paste your updated table into your MS Word document.

8.  The Fog Index is a measure of reading difficulty used by newspaper and magazine editors.  This measure takes into account both sentence length and word size.  Set up another column on your spreadsheet to calculate the Fog Index, where you can use the following formula:

Fog Index = 0.4 * ( words_per_sentence  +  percent_of_Big_Words )

Copy and paste your updated table into your MS Word document.

9.  A Fog Index value of 9 purportedly indicates a ninth-grade reading level, a value of 12 indicates a 12th grade reading level, and a value of 14 indicates a college-sophomore reading level.  Based on your calculations, does this seem reasonable?  Why or why not?

10.  There are several web-sites that offer automated versions of the Fog Index.  For example,  http://simbon.madpage.com/Fog/ is one, but you can use a search engine to find many others. Use the given Fog Index calculator, or another that you've found, and calculate the Fog Index for each of your passages. (If you use "Google" to find another Fog Index calculator, just remember to share the URL).  What does the calculator give as a Fog Index?  It's probably different than your calculation above. Why? 

Summary
In this activity, you examined the Fog Index for two passages of text and looked at whether the Fog Index is a reasonable measure of reading difficulty.