Re: Fog Index

["Dick Margulis " <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net>]

I agree with both Geoff and Jan in everything they said and would like to add another point.

Psychologists have studied the relationship between sentence structure (for a fixed sentence length and identical meaning) and people's ability to understand what is being said. I can't point to a particular study, because I read about the work mumble years ago in Scientific American. However, I remember the graphics and the conclusion.

The authors measured the "depth" of a sentence, having something (lost in foggy memory) to do with dependent clauses (or maybe it was qualifying phrases) preceding the main clause of the sentence. They found that as this number increased, the listener or reader IQ required to comprehend the sentence increased. With a depth of seven (nothing to do with memorizing phone numbers, by the way, just a coincidence), the only people who could keep track of the sentence's meaning were those at the far right end of the IQ bell curve.

On the other hand, they found that if they turned the sentence around so that it began with the main clause and then laid out the qualifications in a "forward" direction, thereby reducing the depth of the sentence, people of ordinary intelligence had no trouble following it at all. 

I had occasion to attend an informal lecture once that was given by a man I knew casually. Based on several conversations with him, I knew he was-- what's the euphemism?--very bright. I can tell you that I had trouble following his lecture for precisely the reason described in the article. He wound a very long tail in front of nearly every sentence, to the point that by the time he got to the main verb, I wasn't sure what he was talking about, although clearly he understood himself well indeed.

Anyway, just thought I'd throw that in.

Dick

Jan Henning <henning -at- r-l -dot- de> wrote:


>
>- It is insulting (to the audience) to suggest that long sentences lose
>them in the dense fog. Not everybody is a child or idiot. In fact, for
>some audiences, it may be appropriate to use more sophisticated
>structures (with which it is easier to express sophisticated concepts) in
>order to lose fewer of them. 
>

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