SMOG (Simple Measure Of Gobbledygook)
Encyclopedia
SMOG is a readability
formula that estimates the years of education needed to understand a piece of writing. SMOG is widely used, particularly for checking health messages. The SMOG formula yields a 0.985 correlation
with a standard error
of 1.5159 grades with the grades of readers who had 100% comprehension of test materials.
SMOG was published by G. Harry McLaughlin in 1969 as a more accurate and more easily calculated substitute for the Gunning-Fog Index. To make calculating a text's readability as simple as possible an approximate formula was also given — count the words of three or more syllables in three 10-sentence samples, estimate the count's square root (from the nearest perfect square), and add 3.
Numerous online calculators give the SMOG level of submitted text or a URL but only the SMOG Calculator listed below as an external link uses a dictionary to look up the syllable length of words. Because of this, the SMOG Calculator counts syllables more accurately than any other readability program.
In 2010 a study published in the Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh stated that “SMOG should be the preferred measure of readability when evaluating consumer-orientated healthcare material.” The study found that “The Flesch-Kincaid formula significantly underestimated reading difficulty compared with the gold standard SMOG formula.”
Applying SMOG to other languages lacks statistical validity.
Readability
Readability is the ease in which text can be read and understood. Various factors to measure readability have been used, such as "speed of perception," "perceptibility at a distance," "perceptibility in peripheral vision," "visibility," "the reflex blink technique," "rate of work" , "eye...
formula that estimates the years of education needed to understand a piece of writing. SMOG is widely used, particularly for checking health messages. The SMOG formula yields a 0.985 correlation
Correlation
In statistics, dependence refers to any statistical relationship between two random variables or two sets of data. Correlation refers to any of a broad class of statistical relationships involving dependence....
with a standard error
Standard error
Standard error can refer to:* Standard error , the estimated standard deviation or error of a series of measurements* Standard error stream, one of the standard streams in Unix-like operating systems...
of 1.5159 grades with the grades of readers who had 100% comprehension of test materials.
SMOG was published by G. Harry McLaughlin in 1969 as a more accurate and more easily calculated substitute for the Gunning-Fog Index. To make calculating a text's readability as simple as possible an approximate formula was also given — count the words of three or more syllables in three 10-sentence samples, estimate the count's square root (from the nearest perfect square), and add 3.
Numerous online calculators give the SMOG level of submitted text or a URL but only the SMOG Calculator listed below as an external link uses a dictionary to look up the syllable length of words. Because of this, the SMOG Calculator counts syllables more accurately than any other readability program.
In 2010 a study published in the Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh stated that “SMOG should be the preferred measure of readability when evaluating consumer-orientated healthcare material.” The study found that “The Flesch-Kincaid formula significantly underestimated reading difficulty compared with the gold standard SMOG formula.”
Applying SMOG to other languages lacks statistical validity.
Formulae
To calculate SMOG- Count a number of sentences (at least 30)
- In those sentences, count the polysyllables (words of 3 or more syllables).
- Calculate using
-
This version (sometimes called the SMOG Index) is more easily used for mental math:- Count the number of polysyllabic words in three samples of ten sentences each.
- Take the square root of the nearest perfect squareSquare numberIn mathematics, a square number, sometimes also called a perfect square, is an integer that is the square of an integer; in other words, it is the product of some integer with itself...
- Add 3
External links
- SMOG Calculator counts multi-syllable words more accurately than any other readability program.