This week: What Do Readers Want   Edited by: Max Griffin 🏳️‍🌈                              More Newsletters By This Editor   1. About this Newsletter 2. A Word from our Sponsor 3. Letter from the Editor 4. Editor's Picks 5. A Word from Writing.Com 6. Ask & Answer 7. Removal instructions Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators. Albert Camus Just as you grieve if a friend is killed, you should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. If somebody dies and you just go get more popcorn, it's a superficial experience isn't it? George R. R. Martin You can do the best research and be making the strongest intellectual argument, but if readers don't get past the third paragraph you've wasted your energy and valuable ink. Carl Hiaasen I want readers to feel: OK, this probably didn't happen, but it might have. Ken Follett ASIN: B07NPKP5BF Rory's Story Cubes Voyage Product Type: Toys & Games Amazon's Price: Price N/A Buy Now!                                                   What Do Readers Want?                                                   The answer to this question could be a whole series of newsletters. Arguably, readers of genre fiction want different things. Readers of cozy mysteries, for example, want a mystery and a feeling of, well, coziness. Readers of hard-boiled detective novels want a mystery, too, but also a gritty fictional world with a no-nonsense, cynical detective. So, readers want different things from different genres. That’s why genres exist. Even more to the point, readers of non-fiction want different things from readers of fiction. I’m primarily interested in non-fiction, so I’ll rephrase the question.                                                   What Do Readers of Fiction Want?                                                   To answer this question, think about how people describe memorable books and stories. Books hook us, mesmerize us, transfix us. Effective storytellers seduce us, enchant us, bewitch us. They sap our will, remove us from reality, immerse us in alternative worlds. You know what else does those things? Drugs, that’s what. There’s a scary similarity between the words people use to describe addiction to drugs and reading. If you Google “reading and endorphins,” you’ll find thousands of articles1 that suggest that reading increases things like serotonin, dopamine, and other brain chemicals. These are some of the same pleasure-inducing chemicals that make certain substances addictive.                                                   Is reading an addiction?                                                   Well, no, not really. Generally, to be an addiction2, an activity also needs to have adverse consequences, such as impairments in social relationships, work, or health. Another Google search gives thousands of links to the benefits of reading, including cognitive benefits. There’s no research—at least, none I could find—on negative consequences of reading. 3 There’s no denying that reading can give pleasure. The (supposed) increases in pleasure-inducing endorphins would support that contention Sometimes we read because we have to. I’m spending the week reading IRS regulations because, well, death, taxes, etc. When we’re students, we might read fiction because we have to. In this case, I’m remembering an excruciating semester sixty years ago spent reading My Anotnia by Willa Cather. However, a mandatory activity is rarely an addictive activity. I’d argue that most people read fiction for pleasure. It’s got that in common with drugs, but it’s lacking other addictive elements. For one thing, we can choose to read or not, at will. True, an effective story takes control of our will and makes us keep reading, but it’s not the same experience, the same intensity, as that from addictive substances.                                                   Implications for Authors.                                                   If you accept the premise that most people will read fiction for pleasure, then the next question is what are the implications for authors? A lesson I learned as a novice writer (well, more novice than now) is informative here. I’d written a story where my point-of-view character was confused, having just woken from a dream. I figured the way to show the character’s confusion was with confusing prose. It made sense at the time. I was just applying lessons I thought I'd learned. I was supposed to be in the character’s head. I was supposed to show, not tell. So, to show her being confused, it made perfect sense to me that I should do that with confusing prose. A wiser and more effective author then asked me, “Do you think people read fiction because they want to be confused?” She went on to point out that confusing prose will annoy the reader and thus make them, you know, stop reading. That’s kind of contrary to an author’s purpose in writing a story. So, one implication of readers-reading-for-pleasure might be don’t annoy your readers. In fact, my mathematical mind jumped to the corollary: don’t confuse your readers. Back then, when I was a novice fiction author (again, more novice than now), I’d already published lots of scholarly articles in mathematics journals. I thought that meant I knew how to write. It did, but almost everything I knew was wrong when applied to writing fiction. The one thing that was right, the one thing that transferred over to fiction writing, was that you should write clearly. If we combine readers-reading-for-pleasure with writing-with-clarity, we get that the words on the page should be readable. The reader should be able to connect those words with the here-and-now of the fictional world and with the characters who inhabit that world. The words should evoke those connections in a natural way. Remember the words we use to characterize memorable stories, the ones at the start of this newsletter? They all are things a memorable story does to us as readers. The words on the page transport us to the fictional world and make it real. It’s not a stretch to conclude that the easier it is to read the words on the page, the more effective they will be in suspending the reader’s disbelief and injecting them, willy-nilly, into the fictional world. Readable prose tends to use shorter words and shorter sentences. There’s more than readability at work, of course. Prose also needs to be engaging. We don’t want the readers’ minds wandering while reading our stories. There are many elements of craft—things like show-don’t-tell—that make prose engaging. But, as with readability, there are at least two quantitative measures that can make prose more engaging: varying word length and sentence length.                                                   Measures of Readability.                                                   If you use MS Word (I often whine about Word, but it’s got lots of good features, too), it includes tools that will analyze your document for readability. You can even set the tools to “formal” or “informal” writing. It also analyzes for grammar. Its suggestions are not 100% accurate, but they can be enormously helpful in proofreading and revising. There are two readability tests in Word: the Flesch Reading-Ease, and the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level. Both are based on sentence and word length, but the computations are slightly different. The Gunning Fog Index is similar to the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level in that they both give a US-equivalent grade level based on similar inputs. The Gunnng-Fog index, however, is more sensitive to varying word and sentence lengths. Newspapers generally have a grade level of between six and seven. The Scientific American has grade level of around ten. Stylists like Thomas Pynchon and Tolkien have grade levels of around six. Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea has a grade level of 4.1. These examples prove fiction authors can have both a distinctive voice and an eloquent style, and still be both readable and engaging. If you’re wondering, this article has a grade level of eight while the novel I’m currently working on has a grade level of five. Reading-ease scores are slightly less intuitive than grade levels, and only roughly translate to grade level. The higher the reading-ease score, the more readable the document. The highest reading score possible is 120, but even Dr. Seuss struggles to get to that level. A score between 80 and 90 roughly corresponds to a sixth grade reading level. A score of less than 30 requires the equivalent of a college degree to understand, and under ten a more advanced degree. One sentence Swan’s Way by Proust has a readability score of -515.                                                   How Many Americans Can Read Your Story?                                                   I've found numerous web sites that assert the average US adult reads at the seventh to eighth grade level. Some are even more explicit, saying 4 54% of adults have a literacy below sixth-grade level. 21% of Americans 18 and older are illiterate in 2022. If that's true, and if your document has a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of seven, 54% of US adults can't read and understnad it. Even more alarmingly, 21% of US adults can't read and understand Goodnight Moon, a popular children's storybook. Other generally reliable sources assert that most people's reading comprehension is three to four years less than their highest educational attainment. All of this means that higher grade levels--or lower readability scores--severely limit who will read what you write. Shane Snow   has calcluted the reading scores for a sample of authors and titles that's instructive. Almost every best-selling author writes at grade level eight or less. If you're interested in the classics, you can find the readabililty scores for many nineteenth century authors on this University of Southern Florida website.                                                     The Numbers                                                   I'm a mathguy by training and inclidnation. I like to see the actual numbers. I don't have any reason to doubt the validity of any of the above numbers, but it turns out to be really, really hard to find the actual research that underpins some of this. Consider the original Flesch-Kindaid numbers. How, exactly, did they come up with the formula and the grade leevl equivalents? I actually *found* their 1975 paper.   Here's what I learned. First, the US Navy funded their research. The actual study involved testing the abililty of a sample of Navy personnel to read and understand a variety of Naval documents. The data they gathered included the educational achievement of the individuals in the sample, the degree to which they understood the document, and, of course, the word and sentence lengths of the various documents. The result was the original Flesch reading scale. Its successors have generally followed the same general methodology. This means that the usual intuitive interpretation of the scales, for example, that "a typical eighth grader can read and understand a document with a calclulated grade level of eight," is NOT supported by the data. That's becasue they never measured what a "typical eighth grader" can read and understand. Instead, they measured what adult Navy personnel could read and understand and correlated that with the educational attainment of those personnel. The connection is indirect, and does not take into account many other factors than grade level that influence an adult's reading comprehension. The conclusions in the paper--and the formula--have statistical validity, but the connection to the intuitive understanding is indirect and more tenuous. In contrast, adult literacy studies almost always measure specific competencies, usually divided into five levels. There is no statistical correlation between these competency levels and, for example, "what a typical eighth grader can read." Indeed, I could find no studies that even attempted such a correlation. Similarly, I could find no studies that did what the original Flesch-Kincaid study did but on the general US population, namely, compare reading comprehension of a group US adults with their educational attainment. I suspect that such studies may exist--they would be simple to do, after all. I just couldn't find any. The motivation to do such a study is somewhat limited, however, since the data from the National Center for Education Statistics on literacy   that uses competency levels are both robust and tailored to measure what an adult needs in order to be an informed, successful, and productive citizen. If you're interested, the data show a small but alarming decline in US literacy, which COVID appears to have accelerated.                                                   Conclusions                                                   Readers read for pleasure. Among other things, this means that your prose should be both readable and engaging. You can use craft to make your prose engaging. Using shorter words, sentences, and paragraphs, along with varying their lengths, makes prose more readable. MS Word provides tools to measure grade level, and many famous authors, even those with distinctive and memorable styles, write at less than seventh graade level.   STATIC Calling  (13+) "The magic isn't something we do, it's something that happens to us." #1596460 by Raven She and AI  (18+) Revenge is a character assassination service run by gangsters on the Darknet using AI. #2327915 by LightinMind   A Pleasant Little Chat  (E) Michael and his new Mom talk during lunch #2333564 by KS23   STATIC Artificial Intelligence  (18+) "I have emotions. I'm real...." #1233316 by W.D.Wilcox   STATIC Detecting the Detective  (ASR) Just who is under investigation? Contest Entry #2209805 by Richard ~ Looking for Luck!   STATIC What About B.O.B.  (13+) Religion and Artificial Intelligence—what could go wrong? #2196498 by Eric Wharton   Ethical Considerations: AI in Design  (E) Ethical considerations for designers using AI #2324235 by Colby Parson   Submit an item for consideration in this newsletter! https://www.Writing.Com/go/nl_form Have an opinion on what you've read here today? Then send the Editor feedback! Find an item that you think would be perfect for showcasing here? Submit it for consideration in the newsletter!          https://www.Writing.Com/go/nl_form Don't forget to support our sponsor! ASIN: 0997970618 Dear Writer, You Need to Quit (QuitBooks for Writers) Product Type: Book Amazon's Price: $ 14.99 Buy Now! Don't Be Shy! Write Into This Newsletter! This form allows you to submit an item on Writing.Com and feedback, comments or questions to the Writing.Com Newsletter Editors. In some cases, due to the volume of submissions we receive, please understand that all feedback and submissions may not be responded to or listed in a newsletter. Thank you, in advance, for any feedback you can provide! Writing.Com Item ID To Highlight (Optional): Send a comment or question to the editor! Limited to 2,500 characters. ASIN: B00KN0JEYA How to Write Dazzling Dialogue: The Fastest Way to Improve Any Manuscript (Bell on Writing) Product Type: Kindle Store Amazon's Price: $ 4.99 Buy Now! To stop receiving this newsletter, click here for your newsletter subscription list. Simply uncheck the box next to any newsletter(s) you wish to cancel and then click to "Submit Changes". You can edit your subscriptions at any time.

Footnotes
1  Actually finding research that substantiates these benefits turns out to be a challenge. The closest I could come is
Hruby, George G., Usha Goswami, Carl H. Frederiksen, and Charles A. Perfetti. “Neuroscience and Reading: A Review for Reading Education Researchers.” Reading Research Quarterly 46, no. 2 (2011): 156–72. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41203419.
2  American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental health disorders (5th ed.)
3  Omitting, of course, articles on things like texting while driving.
4  The National Literacy Institute Website