

Gunning fog index - karterk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunning-Fog_Index

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eboyjr
I love these random Wikipedia articles which end up being very interesting.

I do agree that the longer the sentence, the harder it is to read. I think a
good improvement to this algorithm would be to have varying degrees of
"complexity" based on the word popularity instead of having a binary
classification of complex/non-complex. Instead of using a percentage of
complex words like that formula does, you could use a weighted percentage
based on the popularity of each word in a word frequency list. Or even better,
you can measure the word-based information entropy contained in the writing
sample.

Frequency lists are everywhere:
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists)
This has the added advantage of being able to use the dictionary tuned for
your target audience is. As an example if you are targeting a system
administrator, the index could be made more accurate by using a frequency list
generated from UNIX man pages. (tongue-in-cheek)

