week 6 discussion 2

The Gunning Fog Index was developed in 1952 by Robert Gunning, a textbook publisher. Gunning observed that high school graduates were not able to read much of what was written in newspapers and business documents. He determined that the reason for their inability to read such material was the writing. He felt that many of the texts in newspapers and business documents were unnecessarily complex.

The Gunning Fog Index calculates the complexity of passages of text using an algorithm. For more information on how the index calculates the text, see the following websites:

For an example, please copy the following text and paste it into the text box at this link: :

Increasingly, residents of the United States are accessing digital government services through mobile applications, or apps. Legislation has passed that mandates that federal government agencies have mobile apps available, and user behavior indicates that more and more users are accessing the Internet through mobile apps.

The increase in traffic through apps, the unsecured environments in which users often access apps, and the increase in the amount of data being processed from the access to apps means that this trend has caused an elevation in security concerns as well. Users personal identifiable information (PII) can be accessed by cyber criminals as residents access digital government services in locations with unsecured Wi-Fi. In addition, such information is also at risk as different levels of users from employees to contractors access the data and process it.

Government agencies must take the steps outlined in this report as they develop apps for their target audiences. The platform for the mobile devices, the data on the devices, and the transmission of this data between the device and the server must be secured through the various methods articulated in this document.

Gunning concluded that a piece of text should have a fog index of less than 12 in order to be readable to a wide audience.

1. What was the fog index of the paragraph above? Please give at least two reasons for its score, based on your understanding of how the Gunning Fog Index calculates the level of complexity.
2. Copy your executive summary from your report to Sally Charleston and paste it into the text box for this site. What was your fog index?
3. Consider Sallys education level. Do you think your fog index score is appropriate for a reader like Sally? Why or why not?
4. Do you think the Gunning Fog Index is a valid method of determining the complexity of a piece of text? Why or why not?

Feel free to use the Gunning Fog Index for your writing both in this class and in other classes.