If you are building a website, here’s why your SMOG score is important

 If you are building a website and want people to stay around and not click past your site, you should pay attention to readability. SMOG scores and Flesch counts can help.

“SMOG” is not what what you think it is. This SMOG is not about air quality, but about language: obfuscation to be exact.

An acronym for the “Simple Measure of Gobbledygook,” SMOG is a measure of readability that estimates the years of education needed to understand a piece of writing. SMOG involves mathematics, and its formula is:

To calculate SMOG, first

1. Count a number of sentences (at least 30).

2. In those sentences, count the polysyllables (words of 3 or more syllables).

Perhaps I should define “obfuscation,” because that is at the heart of this story: “Google’s terms and conditions are less readable than Beowulf,” shouts a headline from the website “The Conversation.” Obfuscation is what legalese is all about, making language so dull and boring that few want to read it, and fewer understand it. To be fair to Beowulf, the epic poem is one of the few surviving examples of Old English, the English spoken and written before 1000 B.C. (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, written in the 1300s, is Middle English; Shakespeare and the King James Bible, written in the late 1500s, early 1600s, are examples of early Modern English.) For legal language to be compared to an almost dead language shows how dense it is, and a perfect illustration of “obfuscation.”

SMOG is not the only mathematical measure of language. The Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level is another widely used measure of writing, also with a mathematical formula. The grade level is the other end of this calculation:

Rightwriter was an early grammar checker – from the 1980s – that used the Flesch count. A simple rule to remember was that a sentence should not exceed 22 words. After 22 words, a sentence has a tendency to become unwieldy, and Rightwriter, good at counting, would warn you to look at your long sentences and make sure they were clear.

Spell checkers and grammar checkers today are routinely included in word-processing programs. Use them as a tool to check how well you are understood.