Keys to Writing Effectively (continued)

The Fog Index is a readability test designed to show how easy or difficult a text is to read. It uses a formula of average number of words in a sentence and the number of three or more syllables. The Fog Index gives the number of years of education that your reader hypothetically needs to understand the paragraph or text. This means that your writing needs to be at a level that your audience is able to comprehend.

The Fog Index formula implies that short sentences written in plain English achieve a better score than long sentences written in complicated language.


We have talked about some of the keys to good communication. We now need to discuss very briefly what hampers clear communication. What causes breakdowns in communication?

  1. Speaking in a way that doesn't relate to your audience.

  2. Using sentence fragments in your writing. What are sentence fragments?

    For example, if you say something like: "Two hundred cheering fans." You will notice that all the words are spelled correctly and it appears like this could be a sentence, except we don't know what the point is. This sentence needs a verb.

    What about the two hundred cheering fans? Is it a baseball game, a hockey game, or is it about Justin Bieber in his home town? The sentence needs something more. So, then, a complete sentence might say, "Two hundred cheering fans came out to see me finish my first marathon!" Now we know what the fans were doing and what the situation is.

    So, a sentence fragment is a piece of, or a part of, a sentence but not the whole part. The word "fragment" says it all.

  3. Using run-on sentences: Wow, this type of sentence is just one that keeps on going and going like the energizer bunny and no one knows exactly where that sentence will stop because the writer just keeps on going because the writer really doesn't know exactly when to stop and why and it feels almost like if they stop then they may lose the audience but that is not the case at all because people do have to breathe sometimes and it is a real relief when a run-on sentence finally stops.


    Whew, that was hard to read and listen to and hard to figure out exactly what the sentence is trying to tell us. That is a run-on sentence. There are ways of varying your writing so that it is effective, but run-on sentences will not be one technique.

    In our writing, we need to be careful to make sure that the point is clear and complete when we communicate our thoughts on paper so that others can follow what we are thinking. So, to make it fairly technical, we can say that a complete sentence has to have a subject and a verb and has to express a complete thought. If you are using a text to speech program, you need to make sure that you are putting in the punctuation, because they won't be doing it for you.