Why are TV commercials so much loader than the television programming?

I cannot stand how channels are programmed to be louder than the programming it is played between.   Can someone please make it stop!?!    It almost makes me want to stop watching TV.

dumb question?

If there is no such thing as a “dumb question,” why is there apparently such thing as a “great question” or an “an interesting question”? Over and over, I hear really smart people say things like “that is a great question”, and I think this must mean that the speaker is judging a question on a scale of quality. My question is thus do “dumb questions” really exist, and can they be identified as that question which is not followed by “that’s a great question”?

A Fog Index < 21

Apparently (I read somewhere) you don’t want a Fog Index score greater than 20 if you are giving a speech to a live audience.  This is important to those of us that feel we should write as if we were going to read our writing to a live audience, because this implies our writing should also have a Fog Index score not greater than 20.

The Fog Index is a type of readability test for your writing that essentially indicates how long–on average–your sentences and words are.   The longer the words and sentences, the more difficult it is for readers to read, and the higher the score will be.

If you want a quick tool that calculates multiple readability tests (including the Fog Index) for your writing, check out:    The Readability Test Tool.