IN A RECENT ISSUE of this journal, Fry (4) described "a readability
formula that saves time." The panel immediately below gives a
method of assessing readability which is even quicker—and so
simple that one statistician who glanced at an earlier version of
this paper thought that it was a "put on," a fake. Although this
system, SMOG Grading, is laughably simple, it is in fact more
valid than previous readability formulas. The rest of this paper is
devoted to substantiating that claim