The Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG)
The formula is the creation of G. Harry McLaughlin, who has spent much of his life in applied psychology. Harry started his career as a sub-editor of the Mirror newspaper in London, one of the largest and most readable newspapers in the world. He left the newspaper to pursue a doctorate in psycholinguistics at the University of London. His thesis, "What Makes Prose Understandable," showed why the readability formulas work: longer words and sentences put greater demands on memory. After teaching human communications at City University of London, he moved to Toronto, where he taught briefly at York University and then to the University of Syracuse, where he published his SMOG formula in 1969. Harry worked two years with NASA, helping them develop procedures for staffing Mission Control in Houston. Then he taught at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. The Quest for a Better FormulaWhat had originally inspired Harry was the desire to improve on the available formulas. Believing that the vocabulary and sentence features of a text interact with one another, his formula multiplied them instead of adding them as other formulas did. The SMOG formula requires counting the number of words with more than two syllables in 30 sentences (the polysyllable count) and then applying this simple formula: SMOG grade = 3 + square root of polysyllable count. Harry validated his formula against the McCall-Crabbs reading tests, using a 100% correct-answer criterion. As a result, his formula generally predicts scores higher than other formulas. Fortunately for us, Harry's interests have again returned to finding a better formula. While working on that, he has put his current formula on his Web page, where you can paste and test your documents: http://webpages.charter.net/ghal/SMOG.html The page also features three of Harry's original articles on readability.
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