A couple of days ago, while discussing E.B. White -- albeit not in the context of his role as a writer of children's literature -- Mark Liberman commended this 2Blowhards post as worthy further reading on the subject of "plain writing".
The author briefly discusses the work of Rudolf Flesch, best known for Why Johnny Can't Read, in trying to develop criteria for readability. Flesch's best-known effort along those lines is the Flesch-Kincaid grade level, which every Microsoft Word user has ready access to (which is not to say that they all have any idea of what to do with it). For our purposes, it's enough to note that the idea is that sentences with shorter lengths and shorter words are supposed to be easier to read at lower grade levels than those sentences with longer words/word lengths. The provided link has some interesting criticisms suggesting that text coherence and cognitive abilities of the reader are more relevant to determining readability (but that last one seems to be merely offloading grade level from text to readers).
This all came to have some salience to SC a few minutes ago in the context of this New York Times story on an award-winning writer of children's fiction named Francesca Block. The books deal with characters described by the Times like so:
Weetzie Bat wears vintage clothes decorated with sparkles. She has a boyfriend she calls "My Secret Agent Lover Man." They live with Dirk, Weetzie's gay best friend, his lover, Duck, and Weetzie's daughter, Cherokee, possibly conceived during group sex with Dirk and Duck. There is also Witch Baby, Lover Man's child with a witch. The family works in the movie business. And they become involved with seamier elements of Los Angeles: rough sex, pimps and drugs.
Now, the books aren't addressed to "children" in the sense of kindergarteners and preschoolers, but rather to "young adults", defined like so:
"Young adult used to mean 12 to 18," he said. "Now it's for readers as old as 25."
Ms. Block is credited with influencing other authors to bring out similarly edgy fare:
Ms. Block helped pave the way for the explicit young-adult books of today, including Laurie Halse Anderson's "Speak," about date rape, and Melvin Burgess's "Smack," about London street kids using heroin. This spring, Simon & Schuster is bringing out "Rainbow Party," by Paul Ruditis, a young-adult novel about oral sex. "She's definitely on the edge still," said Joe Monti, a children's book buyer at Barnes & Noble of Ms. Block, "but she's not alone anymore."
Now, far be it from your host to be for keeping Mark Twain out of school libraries, or Susan Cooper or J.K. Rowling, or a lot of other people for that matter. Dealing with sorcery/magic isn't going to inspire anyone to anything, since the books can't be "how-to" manuals if you can't really do what they describe. And there's certainly an argument to be made that teenagers can't be kept from reading about sex, drugs and rock'n'roll forever.
But at the same time, it's clear that the publishers are stealing a base in defining age-appropriate material. 25-year-olds just don't make up a significant portion of the reading audience at junior high schools, and they're not much more of the senior high crowd, either. If literature is going to be pitched to "young adults" on the grounds that some difference in Flesch-style readability criteria is necessary, then one might reasonably expect them to respect the differences in what parents want for their 12-year-olds (who they are still very much responsible for), for their 18-year-olds (who they often end up shouldering the bills for, regardless of control) and their 25-year-olds (who at least in theory are independent adults at that point, beyond their control). SC does not particularly want his future children reading about group sex at age 12, when he anticipates struggling to keep his kids in line vis-a-vis the one-on-one version of the act. Other people clearly feel differently.
There is a lot more to be said on the question of what defines age-appropriate literature. It's been a while since SC addressed a topic in-depth, and so over the next month, we're going to take a look at some of the claims advanced by organizations like the American Library Association or Parents Against Bad Books in Schools, and the literature itself to try to systematically address what it means to say that a book is a "children's book" versus an "adult book".
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