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Readability

Gunning Fog Index

The Gunning Fog Index measures readability. And what is good readability? It’s when you write something and the person reading clearly understands what you are communicating. It can be challenging to ensure that what you write makes sense to average readers. It's not always easy to hold your intended audience's attention so that they want to go on reading, which is where the Gunning Fog Index comes in.

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Introduction

Our text compare tool is a fantastic, lightweight tool that provides plagiarism checks between two documents. Whether you are a student, blogger or publisher, this tool offers a great solution to detect and compare similarities between any two pieces of text. In this article, I will discuss the different ways to use the tool, the primary features of the tool and who this tool is for. There is an FAQ at the bottom if you run into any issues when trying to use the tool.

What makes Originality.ai’s text comparison tool stand out?

Keyword density helper – This tool comes with a built-in keyword density helper in some ways similar to the likes of SurferSEO or MarketMuse the difference being, ours is free! This feature shows the user the frequency of single or two word keywords in a document, meaning you can easily compare an article you have written against a competitor to see the major differences in keyword densities. This is especially useful for SEO’s who are looking to optimize their blog content for search engines and improve the blog’s visibility.

Ways to compare

File compare – Text comparison between files is a breeze with our tool. Simply select the files you would like to compare, hit “Upload” and our tool will automatically insert the content into the text area, then simply hit “Compare” and let our tool show you where the differences in the text are. By uploading a file, you can still check the keyword density in your content.

URL compare

Comparing text between URLs is effortless with our tool. Simply paste the URL you would like to get the content from (in our example we use a fantastic blog post by Sherice Jacob found here) hit “Submit URL” and our tool will automatically retrieve the contents of the page and paste it into the text area, then simply click “Compare” and let our tool highlight the difference between the URLs. This feature is especially useful for checking keyword density between pages!

Simple text compare

You can also easily compare text by copying and pasting it into each field, as demonstrated below.

Features of Originality.ai’s Text Compare Tool

Ease of use

Our text compare tool is created with the user in mind, it is designed to be accessible to everyone. Our tool allows users to upload files or enter a URL to extract text, this along with the lightweight design ensures a seamless experience. The interface is simple and straightforward, making it easy for users to compare text and detect the diff.

Multiple text file format support

Our tool provides support for a variety of different text files and microsoft word formats including pdf file, .docx, .odt, .doc, and .txt, giving users the ability to compare text from different sources with ease. This makes it a great solution for students, bloggers, and publishers who are looking for file comparison in different formats.

Protects intellectual property

Our text comparison tool helps you protect your intellectual property and helps prevent plagiarism. This tool provides an accurate comparison of texts, making it easy to ensure that your work is original and not copied from other sources. Our tool is a valuable resource for anyone looking to maintain the originality of their content.

User Data Privacy

Our text compare tool is secure and protects user data privacy. No data is ever saved to the tool, the users’ text is only scanned and pasted into the tool’s text area. This makes certain that users can use our tool with confidence, knowing their data is safe and secure.

Compatibility

Our text comparison tool is designed to work seamlessly across all size devices, ensuring maximum compatibility no matter your screen size. Whether you are using a large desktop monitor, a small laptop, a tablet or a smartphone, this tool adjusts to your screen size. This means that users can compare texts and detect the diff anywhere without the need for specialized hardware or software. This level of accessibility makes it an ideal solution for students or bloggers who value the originality of their work and need to compare text online anywhere at any time.

The index was developed by Robert Gunning, an American businessman

The index estimates whether the formal education you've received matches your reading comprehension. Gunning figured out that school students couldn’t read because they couldn’t write properly. He believed that newspapers and business writing contained complicated text that students couldn’t comprehend.

So he took readability to the workplace

He developed a “team” that was dedicated to working on readability. He even went to those same newspapers, magazines, and business document companies and worked with them. The aim was that their target audiences would enjoy and understand what they were reading and reduce unnecessary complexity.

How he worked it out to use the Gunning Fog Index

In order to calculate a score for readability using the Gunning Fog Index, Gunning took 100 words of text and syllables from a writing sample. He then counted how many sentences were in that group of 100 words. That gave him the Average Sentence Length (ASL).

Then he counted the words in the sentences that had three or four syllables in them, words that weren’t proper nouns, hyphenated words, or two-syllable verbs. He divided the number he arrived at by the total number of words that were in the 100-word passage. This gave the Percentage of Hard Words (PHW).

Then he added the ASL and the PHW together. The result was multiplied by 0.4 which was the grade level. His formula looks like this, for instance: Grade level= 0.4 (ASL + PHW).

What the score means

The whole idea behind the Gunning Fog Index is that sentences that are short and written in plain English receive better scores than sentences that are lengthy with complicated and long English words in them in terms of readability. 

Using this qualitative analysis, Gunning discovered that a Gunning Fog Index score of 7 or 8 was perfect. He also discovered that if the score was over 12, the text would be too complicated and difficult for most people to read. If text, for instance, was written at a graduate level, then it would have a score above 17.

The Gunning Fog formula generates a grade level for readers at scores between 0 and 20

The grade level you are at in your education will determine whether you can understand the text. For instance, if you are a 6th grader, the ideal score for your readability expectations is around 6. People who are school graduates will find reading easy at around an 8th-grade level.

The Gunning Fog Index method isn’t perfect

It might be thought of as quite an accurate measure to score readability and assess readability expectations. However, the Gunning Fog Index does come with some limitations. For instance, in the case of multi-syllable words, it doesn’t take into account that not all of them are difficult to read or understand.

Why is readability so important?

If you own a website and you are putting out “difficult” material for your visitors to read, they are simply going to navigate away to “greener pastures.” As a website owner, you want to increase your click rates, right? If you want people to engage with your content, you need to understand what their reading expectations are.

Who are you putting out content for? Is it for the medical sector? Is it for young kids? Naturally, this is going to impact what kind of writing you deliver. Understanding readability formulas can help you alter your writing and meet the expectations of your different audiences.

How to improve your score

Want to know how to improve your Gunning Fog Index score? Here’s a free readability test tool you can use. All you do is enter your website URL, and the free automatic readability checker will calculate your score using a readability metric. This will help you ensure that your writing is suitable for your intended audience.

The simplicity of the Gunning Fog formula is highly praised today, and there are modern versions that people claim work even better. Check out Readable, for instance. Readable evaluates text just like Gunning's formula does, but it is more modernized and improves accuracy in terms of readability.

Gunning Fog simply helps to reduce the difficulty of writing papers

For researchers, reducing the difficulties of complicated, difficult reading is very appealing. Think of those difficult international medical journals. Writers of these have become aware of the use of the Gunning Index because it is so easily interpreted.

For instance, the Journal of X-Ray Science and Technology will only publish papers with a Gunning Index score of less than 16. There's evidence that people prefer reading simpler text. Physicians who read throwaway journals because they are more appealing than the highfalutin, prestigious journals are an example [1].

Conclusion

The bottom line is, the Gunning Fog Index is still helpful today. It's able to estimate what level of text you can read according to your formal education level. If you want to determine how difficult or easy an article is so you can understand it fully, use the Gunning Fog Index as a readability metric. Your readers will thank you.

All Readability Tests:

Here is a list of all readability tests.

Jonathan Gillham

Founder / CEO of Originality.ai I have been involved in the SEO and Content Marketing world for over a decade. My career started with a portfolio of content sites, recently I sold 2 content marketing agencies and I am the Co-Founder of MotionInvest.com, the leading place to buy and sell content websites. Through these experiences I understand what web publishers need when it comes to verifying content is original. I am not For or Against AI content, I think it has a place in everyones content strategy. However, I believe you as the publisher should be the one making the decision on when to use AI content. Our Originality checking tool has been built with serious web publishers in mind!

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I have to fill out the entire form?

No, that’s one of the benefits, only fill out the areas which you think will be relevant to the prompts you require.

Why is the English so poor for some prompts?

When making the tool we had to make each prompt as general as possible to be able to include every kind of input. Not to worry though ChatGPT is smart and will still understand the prompt.

In The Press

Originality.ai has been featured for its accurate ability to detect GPT-3, Chat GPT and GPT-4 generated content. See some of the coverage below…

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Originality.ai did a fantastic job on all three prompts, precisely detecting them as AI-written. Additionally, after I checked with actual human-written textual content, it did determine it as 100% human-generated, which is important.

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I use this tool most frequently to check for AI content personally. My most frequent use-case is checking content submitted by freelance writers we work with for AI and plagiarism.

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After extensive research and testing, we determined Originality.ai to be the most accurate technology.

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Jon Gillham, Founder of Originality.ai came up with a tool to detect whether the content is written by humans or AI tools. It’s built on such technology that can specifically detect content by ChatGPT-3 — by giving you a spam score of 0-100, with an accuracy of 94%.

Felix Rose-Collins

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ChatGPT lacks empathy and originality. It’s also recognized as AI-generated content most of the time by plagiarism and AI detectors like Originality.ai

Ashley Stahl

forbes.com

Originality.ai Do give them a shot! 

Sri Krishna

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For web publishers, Originality.ai will enable you to scan your content seamlessly, see who has checked it previously, and detect if an AI-powered tool was implored.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why is it important to check for plagiarism?

Tools for conducting a plagiarism check between two documents online are important as it helps to ensure the originality and authenticity of written work. Plagiarism undermines the value of professional and educational institutions, as well as the integrity of the authors who write articles. By checking for plagiarism, you can ensure the work that you produce is original or properly attributed to the original author. This helps prevent the distribution of copied and misrepresented information.

What is Text Comparison?

Text comparison is the process of taking two or more pieces of text and comparing them to see if there are any similarities, differences and/or plagiarism. The objective of a text comparison is to see if one of the texts has been copied or paraphrased from another text. This text compare tool for plagiarism check between two documents has been built to help you streamline that process by finding the discrepancies with ease.

How do Text Comparison Tools Work?

Text comparison tools work by analyzing and comparing the contents of two or more text documents to find similarities and differences between them. This is typically done by breaking the texts down into smaller units such as sentences or phrases, and then calculating a similarity score based on the number of identical or nearly identical units. The comparison may be based on the exact wording of the text, or it may take into account synonyms and other variations in language. The results of the comparison are usually presented in the form of a report or visual representation, highlighting the similarities and differences between the texts.

String comparison is a fundamental operation in text comparison tools that involves comparing two sequences of characters to determine if they are identical or not. This comparison can be done at the character level or at a higher level, such as the word or sentence level.

The most basic form of string comparison is the equality test, where the two strings are compared character by character and a Boolean result indicating whether they are equal or not is returned. More sophisticated string comparison algorithms use heuristics and statistical models to determine the similarity between two strings, even if they are not exactly the same. These algorithms often use techniques such as edit distance, which measures the minimum number of operations (such as insertions, deletions, and substitutions) required to transform one string into another.

Another common technique for string comparison is n-gram analysis, where the strings are divided into overlapping sequences of characters (n-grams) and the frequency of each n-gram is compared between the two strings. This allows for a more nuanced comparison that takes into account partial similarities, rather than just exact matches.

String comparison is a crucial component of text comparison tools, as it forms the basis for determining the similarities and differences between texts. The results of the string comparison can then be used to generate a report or visual representation of the similarities and differences between the texts.

What is Syntax Highlighting?

Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors and integrated development environments (IDEs) that helps to visually distinguish different elements of a code or markup language. It does this by coloring different elements of the code, such as keywords, variables, functions, and operators, based on a predefined set of rules.

The purpose of syntax highlighting is to make the code easier to read and understand, by drawing attention to the different elements and their structure. For example, keywords may be colored in a different hue to emphasize their importance, while comments or strings may be colored differently to distinguish them from the code itself. This helps to make the code more readable, reducing the cognitive load of the reader and making it easier to identify potential syntax errors.

How Can I Conduct a Plagiarism Check between Two Documents Online?

With our tool it’s easy, just enter or upload some text, click on the button “Compare text” and the tool will automatically display the diff between the two texts.

What Are the Benefits of Using a Text Compare Tool?

Using text comparison tools is much easier, more efficient, and more reliable than proofreading a piece of text by hand. Eliminate the risk of human error by using a tool to detect and display the text difference within seconds.

What Files Can You Inspect with This Text Compare Tool?

We have support for the file extensions .pdf, .docx, .odt, .doc and .txt. You can also enter your text or copy and paste text to compare.

Will My Data Be Shared?

There is never any data saved by the tool, when you hit “Upload” we are just scanning the text and pasting it into our text area so with our text compare tool, no data ever enters our servers.

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