It is an index that estimates the level of formal education required by the reader to understand your writing in the first go. Back in the fifties, an American businessman, 'Robert Gunning' felt the urge to calculate the reading level required to understand a given text. Mostly, because based on this index, a writer can effectively reach out to his or her readers.
For a text to be close to the level of being understood at a universal level, the index should be less than 8, although a wide audience can be covered within the index of 12.
But when I tried to understand this index a little more closely, I discovered that the index itself has some shortcomings. Let me start from the basics.
The fundamental involved in this index is that a shorter sentence can be easily read, comprehended and retained, which is obviously not the case with longer sentences. Also, it relies on syllables - words with more are considered to be difficult.
It has been argued that words like 'asparagus' has four syllables, and in spite of that, it is not a difficult word. Similarly, a shorter but lesser known word with less syllables can also turn out to be difficult. Although in 1980s certain changes were made in the original formula, but the formula is still considered to be a little flawed as far as short and long sentences are concerned.
If you wish to calculate your GFI manually, there is quite a complicated formula involved. But who calculates anything manually anymore? Head over to gunning-fox-index.com or check out this readability test tool to calculate GFI for your writing. And do share the results and your views in the comment section below.
By the way, the GFI of this article is about 13 (because 50 words in this article have 3 or more syllables), so I guess I need to start working on making my writing a bit more comprehensible at a universal level. I shall give it my best. I promise!
Until last week I didn't have the faintest idea about what "The Gunning Fog Index" (GFI) was, but when