Genres > Middle Grade (MG) & Chapter Books

target 'readbility" score for MG novel?

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agw408:
I'm in the last draft (s) of a MG novel and one of my beta readers ( an educator, current Phd Candidate and writer who used to work in publishing) questioned the reading level - she worried that the reading level might be too high for my target audience (8-12 year olds). I ran the manuscript through the readability widget on Word and wound up with a total score of 5.3 (which corresponds to grade level here in the US).
My question is two-fold:

Is the Flesch widget on Word reliable or is there a better way to assess readbility
AND
What, if any, is/are the ideal grade level(s) for a MG novel.

Thanks everyone!

Jaina:
I'm no expert, but you sound fine.  You can use the RenLearn Quiz Store to find out what the "book level" or "reading level" is for your favorite MGs and judge for yourself.  Stuff like A View From Saturday, which is a pretty smart (and I think wonderful) MG, is 5.9.  Savvy is a 6.0.

Educators worry about this stuff far more than your standard MG editor, parent and kid, so I'd thank your friend for the advice and just keep in mind--if your content is MG and your writing is much like MGs you are reading, don't sweat the exact "level."  Especially don't dumb down your vocabulary because you think 8-12 year olds "won't get it."  There are all kinds of 8-12 year olds, and some upper MG is more "tween" age (10-14) these days, anyway.

agw408:
Great advice- Jaina. I do know I have some high level vocabulary but as you said I do not want to dumb down in any way. But then again I don' t want agents to read it and take issue. I'll just have to keep it very much in mind as I go through the draft.

TracyH:
Look at the number just above the reading level - the Flesch Reading Ease number. The higher the number, the easier to read. I'd never run these numbers before - my contemporary MG came up a 3.9 with a Reading Ease of 89. But without knowing your genre/story, it's hard to compare.

I'm curious why she thought the reading level might be too high. Was it sentence structure or complexity of thought - vocabulary? That might help you figure it out a bit better. It does sound like your beta knows what she's talking about in terms of her publishing experience, but I'd give it to a few more people and ask them to read with this in mind. Don't worry. Everything is fixable.

TracyH:
ps - I had to go through a revision for my agent for "adult thoughts and words". And I'm going to have to do it again with my editor. This isn't so we can dumb down the text. It's because it's written in first person, and some of the dialogue and ideas come accross as too adult and therefore not authentic to my particular character. But I've read lots of MG with wonderfully complex language and it worked fine. I think it very much depends on the piece. Fantasy seems to get away with this more.

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