Readability?

I notice that on some websites you can post your writing and it will tell you what the reading level is for your writing. Or another way of saying it, what level of reading is needed to read your writing. This got me thinking. What reading level should you try and shot for in your stories? Obviously you want your reading level to fit the audience you're writing for, but I mean in terms of the whole population. What is the average reading level of the whole population to ensure your story has the broadest appeal?

Well, what population are we talking about here? The American population will have a different reading level to the population of other English speaking countries, and to the English speaking world generally.

In practice, I'm not sure how you could ever reach the whole English-literate world unless you're already a bestselling author, so I think you'll always have to keep a relatively narrow target audience in mind.

edit

Advice you might find more useful though, is that if you want to appeal to both children and adults, picture book writing is the most basic and universal in that sense. For that, though, you have to be able to draw (or find an illustrator collaborator), and create a story that adults will be interested in as much as kids (see the works of Shaun Tan).

edited 5th May '15 7:22:04 PM by editerguy

I'll say this for Twilight: Stephanie Meyer has vocabulary and she knows how to use it. That she used it for evil is a minor detail. Her writing style is more sophisticated than Rick Riordan's, but I think Rick Riordan tells much better stories. Scott Westerfeld tells better stories, and his writing style is stilted like a bamboo grove.

Meanwhile, 50 Shades is a morass of Word Salad that has caught mass appeal.

If it's readability alone, I remember The Lady Elizabeth by Alison Weir as particularly refreshing in terms of style, it's the simplest way a person can write before The fabled Average Reader would start to feel talked down to; but it's not a particularly famous title probably for the same reason that I only remember it for the style.

So, I'd put it on the spectrum somewhere between Weir and Meyer.

As a writer, though I personally find it very difficult to consciously decide on a reading level first and then have that be the way it turns out. You've got your own style and voice already, haven't you?

edited 5th May '15 8:38:51 PM by Faemonic

As with just about everything else it's down to execution.

Charles Stross's gonzo density, Patrick O'Brian's 19th-century elegance, Alexander McCall Smith's simplicity, Cormac McCarthy's bleakness, George Macdonald Fraser's irreverence—all are outstandingly memorable examples of prose style that are all very distinct and very different. Impossible to mistake one author for another, yet despite their different approaches it all works.

Tailor your prose to the story and let it draw the audience that finds it. If that means writing at a generally YA level, do so. If it doesn't call for it, don't.

My question was more out of curiosity than anything else.

For the record, there's a recent trend in America's State of the Union addresses (an annual speech given by the President to the American people) that I would personally use as a guide for "where can you reach a lot of people?"

Since about the 1940s, the State of the Union has been at a high-school reading level: 12th grade or lower. ^note Some sources have used that statistic to spell doom, that people are getting "dumber," but it's really just a sign that presidents are trying to reach more people.

So if you want to measure "what level should I write so I can reach a bunch of people?" then you have a real-world answer.

Yeah, I remember coming across that article too. It is an interesting read.