The Gunning-Fog index

Nature publishing group has a science blogroll with a bit of statistics for each blog, here is how it looks like for mine:

• Ranked 18 in science (377 overall)
• 2 post(s) per week (on average)
• 65 post(s) collected so far
• 7,032 words per post (on average)
• 14% complex words (on average)
• Readability by Flesch-Kincaid : best understood by university graduates
• Readability by Gunning-Fog : 146.0
• On 0 blogroll(s)
• 2 links to other science blogs
• 0 links from other science blogs

The first thing that crossed my mind was "what the hell this Gunning-Fog index is?". If you follow the link you get that "The Gunning-Fog index [...] 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."

So, basically an average person needs to study for 146 years to get a rough idea what I'm writing about, while a well understandable text should have the index below 12. First I thought that this is due to appalling English I'm used to, but if you read further you'll see that there is nothing to do with that. The Gunning-Fox index comes from analysis of the average sentence length and the average number of syllables in words.

I never thought those indexes even exist. I promise, I promise to keep sentences shorter... )

Take care,

Misha