Abstract
Table 3: Readability of different English corpora
['Corpus Dickens', '[ITALIC] F 8.6±0.1', 'Corpus Simple', '[ITALIC] F 10.8±0.2']
, the Gunning fog index calculated for 6 different English corpora is reported. Remarkably, the fog index of Simple is higher than that of Dickens, whose writing style is sophisticated but doesn’t rely on the use of longer latinate words which are hard to avoid in an encyclopedia. The British National Corpus, which is a reasonable approximation to what we would want to think of as ‘English in general’ is a third of the way between Simple and Main, demonstrating the accomplishments of Simple editors, who pushed Simple half as much below average complexity as the encyclopedia genre pushes Main above it.