I don't want to write for 11-year-old readers.

When writing, is "simple" always superior?

A very well-meaning friend of mine sent me an article last week; written by James Altucher, the article suggests that writers should pay attention to their Flesch-Kincaid Score (and aim to achieve as low a score as possible).

As Altucher put it, "When you want to express an idea, tell a story, share a vision, get your point across, be simple. Don't use complicated words." 

That sounded like pretty good advice. After all, why use big, fancy words to express an idea that doesn't need them?

So I decided to determine the Flesh-Kincaid Grade-Level scores for my top 5 blog posts to date (as measured by number of views). I copied each post into Microsoft Word, ran the spell-check, and recorded the F-K scores that were returned. The chart below is the result.

What does it mean?
My top-ranking post is the one with the lowest F-K score, which appears to support the author's argument. Except "Great is the Enemy of Go" is also the post with which I launched my blog to all of my Facebook friends, so I suspect there isn't actually any correlation between the post's low F-K score and its popularity. 

My second top-ranked post, "Encouraging Individuality", had the next lowest F-K score. But that one was still written at a Grade 8 level, which the author indicated was considered "bad sales writing".  I wasn't selling a product with my post, but I was selling an idea. 

The average of my Top 5 posts was an 8.4 Grade Level, or about the point when pubescent teenagers begin worrying about how they'll be classified in high-school the following year. I thought, "That can't be good."

Do the experts write for 11-year olds?
I began to wonder how Seth Godin and Mitch Joel would fare on the F-K test. Both individuals are bloggers I read regularly, and each of them are very well-known for their terrific writing and have large, loyal followings as a result. Did Seth and Mitch regularly achieve writing that was more accessible to all?

To find out, I decided to complete the same simple analysis on five recent posts for each author, and here's what happened:

Wait, what? How could this be? Each author has an average writing score above a Grade 8 reading level, and both samples includes posts that round up to Grade 10. Are my two favourite bloggers actually terrible writers?

They're not terrible writers. They're terribly good at writing for their audience.

Seth is a marketing genius, and Mitch is a digital guru. The people who follow their blogs, buy their books, and purchase tickets to hear them speak at events can almost certainly read at above a grade 4 level. So perhaps (based on their F-K score) their writings aren't as universally accessible as they could otherwise be. Does that matter? Not at all, because their work is well-read, well-received, and well-loved by their readers.

And it's only their readers that matter.

People have different tastes and opinions, and like different things as a result. That's even the most beloved art has detractors; it's all subjective. 

Like all great marketers, Seth and Mitch are smart to target their audience. They don't need to write for everyone. They can write for those they feel are going to read it.

I don't want to write for 11-year-old readers.

I primarily write for myself, as a way to improve my ability to develop compelling, convincing, and concise arguments in a reasonable amount of time. (I'll let you judge whether this piece is compelling or convincing, but I've clearly failed at achieving "concise".) 

But I hope to attract intelligent, unconventional, creative people to my blog, and so I try to choose topics I like that I also believe will be interesting to them. And I want to believe that they're okay with reading at a higher grade-level if that's how my writing turns out.

As an aside, I checked the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level score for this post: 7.2. 

Yikes, that's lower than my Top 5 average. I'll try harder next time.