Nowadays in Internet marketing there are many top skilled teachers on the market. Also many newcomers are on their way to publish the first e-book or to write articles.
What do these people have in common?
Well, no matter if you are a professional, expert or a newbie starting in a new career in an individual niche [...]
Nowadays in Internet marketing there are many top skilled teachers on the market. Also many newcomers are on their way to publish the first e-book or to write articles.
What do these people have in common?
Well, no matter if you are a professional, expert or a newbie starting in a new career in an individual niche everybody has to be aware of the so-called fog index. The fog index was designed to measure how “easy to read“ a text is.
As in many cases we know our discipline and our niche very well. Words which are very common for ourself may sound Chinese to somebody who is just starting out in that special discipline. In fact I remember when I started out in Internet marketing and listen to some professionals I hardly understood a word. And to be honest, even today I sometimes wonder what the heck they are talking about.
So in order to write understandable for everybody we should check our text. Are we using technical or “jargon” words, which are clear to us but don’t keep the message simple?
Every young writer gets the “KISS”- formula taught with his mother milk. Keep it simple, stupid. Yet still we always have to remind ourselves of that formula in every text we write.
The same applies to the length of sentences. Robert Gunning invented long ago the already mentioned fog index. It is a nice tool to check if your writing was crystal clear.
To find out about the clarity of your writing follow the steps:
1) Find out how many words you use in an average sentence.
2) To do that, take a full passage that is around 100 words.
3) Divide 100 by the number of sentences you used.
4) Then count words with three or more syllables (so called “complex” word).
5) Add the number of average sentence length and the number of complex words.
6) Take 4/10 of the sum.
The result is your fog index.
Always remember you don’t have to use very complicated words to bring a message across!
Everybody remembers Winston Churchill for his pure and simple messages. His fog index seldom was higher than 5. “We shall never surrender”, “We shall go on to the end” for instance are two quotes of him. Everybody could understand that message just perfectly.
So maybe it’s a good idea to take him as a role model in order to keep it simple, stupid!
By the way, I am aware I still have to work on this too:-)
2 your learning success,
Dirk
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