I love language. Anyone who’s read my monthly article probably knows this. You also might know that I loathe clichés and empty words as much as I love puns. Recently, I began experimenting with wordplay of a different kind – using the reading level tool in Microsoft Word. The purpose of the tool is to see how simple or complex your writing structure is. When I was in school, copy writing for John Q Public was supposed to be written at a sixth grade level. I was told corporate communications or professional communications strives to be at an eighth grade level, while executive or academic language can be 12th grade or higher.
In the next few paragraphs, you’ll see the fairy tale “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” unfold in five different reading levels ranging from 2nd grade to 12th grade. Ask yourself these questions:
What was the easiest to read?
Can you guess the reading level of each paragraph?
Which reading level was most enjoyable?
And now “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”
Once upon a time, there was a girl named Goldilocks. One day, she went on a walk in the forest and saw a house. She knocked on the door of the house. When no one answered, she decided to go inside. Goldilocks was very hungry. Luckily, there were three bowls of porridge in the kitchen. She sat down at the table to eat.
“This porridge burns my palette!” she exclaimed, reaching into the first bowl.
“This porridge chills the tongue,” she uttered after sampling the second saucer.
“This one,” she smiled, “this one is just right.” She thrust her spoon to the bottom of the bowl and proceeded to consume every last drop.
Maybe it was her long days journey through the forest or maybe it was an overload of carbohydrates. Whatever the case, Goldilocks suddenly grew very tired and searched for a place to snooze. Upstairs she found three bedrooms, each with a different-sized bed.
Approaching the first bedroom, she stopped in her tracks, awestruck by the mighty bed before her. Its Victorian-style frame, which seemed fit for a princess, was comprised of handcrafted redwood and draped in satin, silk and other luxurious materials. She climbed atop of the king-sized frame, leaned back and suddenly rose. The bed, in all of its antiquity and presumable elegance, was much too firm for her liking. Her luck failed to change when she approached the second room, where the mattress was half as long and twice as thick as the first. Hoping to find reprieve from her exhaustion, Goldilocks swan-dove into this abyss of fabric. Once again, the mattress failed to suit her fickle tastes and she began to suffocate among the linens. Frustrated, she descended from the second bed and made her way to the final room, hoping this time, fortune would smile on her.
All things seemed to align when she entered the final of the three rooms, as the bed was seemingly couture to her. The mattress catered to her every curve and the pillow welcomed her pale, white cheeks. Sleep comforted the young girl and all appeared to fall into place. But the serenity of slumber would end shortly as the three bears returned from adventures, opened the door and witnessed their home in disarray. The father bear, a husky alpha-male with a zero-tolerance attitude when it came to trespassers, first arrived on the scene. A mighty roar escaped from his chiseled jaw once he saw the disheveled kitchen.
“An intruder plundered my home,” he roared, exposing his claws and gnashing his canines, the same instruments of death used hours earlier to extract nimble salmon from the adjacent river. Equally aghast and defensive, the presumably nurturing mother bear, cradled her only child near her bosom, shielding the young cub with her raised, brown fur.
With the father bear taking the lead, the nuclear family unit scoured the house for signs of the villain who violated their home. The sweet scent of porridge lead the enraged search party to the resting quarters of the child, and in the cub’s bed sat the seemingly sweet Goldilocks, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
His temper fully unleashed, the father bear lunged towards the helpless human. But as his paw approached the fair maiden’s Midas-touched hair, intending to turn its add lowlights of crimson, the young cub intervened.
“I pray you show mercy,” pleaded the little bear, his lip trembling, perhaps from the fear of defying his father, the fear of unnecessary bloodshed or perhaps merely the fear of ruin to his bed. Regardless of his reasoning, selfishness for his own bed or an ironic bout of humanitarianism, the young bear’s interruption offered an opportunity for Goldilocks to compose herself and navigate an escape out of a nearby window. In her hasty escape, Goldilocks left behind a beret, which the bears ultimately used as a doorknocker to ward off future biped intruders.
What surprised me most in this little exercise was how word choice has less to do with the reading level. I thought “Victorian-style…in its antiquity” would surely bump me up a few grade levels. Much to my surprise, in my first draft, that paragraph read at a fifth grade level. What seemed to make the most difference in reducing or expanding the reading level was the length of the paragraph. Long sentences with things in a series seemingly made each sentence more complex.
As a writer, this is great news. It means I can still drop in a savory word and engage in wordplay from time to time without writing “above” an audience. It also means, the best way to make writing more accessible to a wider audience is to simply (pun), shorten the sentence to its purest form. After all that’s the goal of advertising copywriting. Good writing concentrates solely on the message. It reduces the sentence length to crucial words. It gets to the point. It’s just right.