I'm finishing up the [first] edit of the Lincoln book for teens, and I'm annoyed that I've had to restore a bunch of the unnecessarily long words and sentences I'd trimmed, to get the reading level back up.
The publisher uses an online analyzer to determine reading level, and after I'd clarified a lot of murky and tangled sentences and rephrased hard concepts, such as "the elections were contentious due to the issue of popular sovereignty", which I figured most thirteenish year olds wouldn't get (hey, some I didn't get), the analyzer said the book was at 7.4 grade level.
Since even most adults only read at about that level, I was pleased, but the publisher's marketing dept. said I had to bring it up a grade. So, I reinserted the Latinate vocabulary, the cumbersome participial phrases, the passive verb constructions, the political science terminology, and I elongated the sentence structure...
And now it is much worse.
It hurts me to turn it in, knowing a lot of kids will find it hard going.
Out of curiosity, I submitted a bunch of my blog posts, and the analyzer said I write at a 5.8 grade level.
Fine with me.
I'm not trying to write with the elegance of Atget at Versailles, but I did work hard to prune the overgrown verbiage I used to produce.
The publisher uses an online analyzer to determine reading level, and after I'd clarified a lot of murky and tangled sentences and rephrased hard concepts, such as "the elections were contentious due to the issue of popular sovereignty", which I figured most thirteenish year olds wouldn't get (hey, some I didn't get), the analyzer said the book was at 7.4 grade level.
Since even most adults only read at about that level, I was pleased, but the publisher's marketing dept. said I had to bring it up a grade. So, I reinserted the Latinate vocabulary, the cumbersome participial phrases, the passive verb constructions, the political science terminology, and I elongated the sentence structure...
And now it is much worse.
It hurts me to turn it in, knowing a lot of kids will find it hard going.
Out of curiosity, I submitted a bunch of my blog posts, and the analyzer said I write at a 5.8 grade level.
Fine with me.
I'm not trying to write with the elegance of Atget at Versailles, but I did work hard to prune the overgrown verbiage I used to produce.
