Mslexia

Mslexia, the magazine for women who write | www.mslexia.co.uk

Essentials

READABILITY

Typeface: For readability use serif fonts (the ones with embellishments, e.g. Times New Roman). For an avant-garde or modern look, use sans serif (e.g arial).

Font size: An 11/12 point typeface is easiest to read in running text.

Fog index: The Fog Index is a measure of clarity in writing – writing with a high fog index will be difficult to comprehend, 50 being unreadable. Clear writing has a fog index of between nine and 12. To calculate: Take an extract of 100 words (exclude proper nouns and count hyphenated words as one word).

Fog index = (X+Y) x 0.4

Where X = average number of words per sentence, and Y = words with three or more syllables (except plurals or words in a particular tense – e.g. ‘achieving’).

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