Does Literacy Level Matter to Authors?
When we write novels, we often imagine an ideal reader, someone smart, curious, and eager to dive into our worlds. But there’s an important fact many authors overlook: the average American adult reads at about a seventh to eighth grade level. And more than half of U.S. adults read below a sixth grade level. That doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy complex stories, but it does mean that overly dense prose or elaborate sentence structures can make a book harder to access. If you use Microsoft Word, the built-in Editor can give you a readability score based on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level . This tells you the U.S. school grade needed to understand your text on first read. A score of “8” means the average eighth grader could easily follow it. You can turn this feature on in File → Options → Proofing → Show Readability Statistics after running a spelling and grammar check. Another measure you may hear about is the Lexile Framework for Reading . The Lexile scor...