No — this is not a subjective assessment of content. It’s an objective test of readability, courtesy of Muckraked.

As Muckraked describes it:

The Gunning-Fog test is a rough measure of how many years of schooling it would take someone to understand the content … It’s all based on the number of words per sentence, number of syllables per word and the percentage of words with three or more syllables, among other things.

To help you in interpreting Gunning-Fog, here are sample indices for a number of magazines, via Wikipedia:

12 — Atlantic Monthly
11 — Time
10 — Newsweek
8 — Ladies’ Home Journal
6 — Comic books

We ran a bunch of PR, media and marketing blogs (as well as a couple other sites we like) through the Gunning-Fog test. We also threw in a few trade pubs. Here’s how they did:

Thoughts From Ronn Torossian 12.47
Holmes Report Blog 12.13
paidContent.org 11.74
Richard Edelman 6 a.m. 11.17
Communication Overtones 10.79
The Flack 10.73
PR Week 10.59
Independent Sources 10.58
Naked Conversations 10.31
New Millenium PR 10.28
Corporate Engagement 10.23
Regret the Error 10.18
Neville Hobson 10.03
Marketing Roadmaps 9.97
Romenesko 9.80
Mediaweek 9.79
Editor and Publisher 9.77
infOpinions? 9.75
Marketing Blurb 9.61
a shel of my former self 9.57
PR Squared 9.55
The Bad Pitch Blog 9.52
On Message from Wagner Communications 9.49
adfreak 9.47
The One That’s Not About Music 9.40
Media Culpa 9.27
Micro Persuasion 9.24
A Capital Idea 9.07
BrandToBeDetermined 9.02
For What It’s Worth 9.01
Journalism Hope 8.92
Son-of-a-Pitch 8.70
Broadcasting and Cable 8.70
Media Orchard 8.44
Weblogs Work 8.44
Random Culture 8.35
hyku 8.34
Adrants 8.29
Seth Godin’s Blog 8.26
Below the Fold 8.24
Marketing Begins At Home 8.06
Fark 7.75
The Media Drop 7.70
gapingvoid 6.98
Blog Maverick 6.88
Make the Logo Bigger 6.21
TV Newser 6.11

If you’re thinking a higher number is a good thing, that may or may not be the case. Mama taught us to never use big words where small ones will do.

Technorati tags: Journalism, PR, Public Relations, Marketing