Writing Tools

With all of the focus on providing the NSAC community with the tools to develop more professional promotional materials and presentations, it seems like a great idea to roll out a few more tools that may help. On this page, you will find writing tools to help improve your writing.

Writing at the Right Level for your Audience

When you’re writing for an audience, you have to write to their comprehension level. For instance, when advertisers are writing for consumer goods and retail audiences, they write at a grade eight level since that’s the appropriate comprehension level of that segment of a North American audience. That goes to show that you can’t assume that comprehension levels are the same as grade levels obtained so you always err on the conservative side. That typically means that you cut off three to four grade levels of your reading audience.

There’s a formula called the FOG Index that measures the readability of any written material. It’s adapted from the formula of Robert Gunning and Richard A. Kallan in “How to Take the FOG out of Business Writing.” This is how you determine the grade level of your writing:

1. Identify a 100 word sample from your writing.
2. Count the number of sentences, to the nearest half, in your sample.
3. Divide 100 by the number of sentences to get the average number of words in a sentence.
4. Count all the three-or-more syllable words in your sample. Count them each and every time they are used in the sample.
5. Add the average number of words in a sentence to three-or-more syllable words. Multiply the total by 0.4.

The resulting number is your FOG Index, which tells you the grade level of your writing. For example, 10.0 indicates you’re writing at a grade 10 level.

You can find this tool on our new marketing-communications pages at nsac.ca/marketing under Writing Tools in the Brand menu. Use this tool when you’re producing written material for your next audience. You might just find you need to simplify the language to improve clarity.

**FOG Index of this article: 11.76 or a Grade 11 reading level**