Reading is Hard

I spent some time with one of my friends and her 6-year old twins recently. They came to visit with a big pile of first-level reading books, and we adults had a chance to help them over the hard parts.

I don’t know about you, but I remember learning to read. I remember getting stuck and needing help because, well, English can be tricky. But there were some things that surprised me.

Remember Your Audience

Some of the sentences in these books were well above the reading level of my friend’s twins. Just because what you’re writing makes perfect sense to you, doesn’t mean your audience doesn’t need a little hand-holding.

Keep it Simple

We already know you’ve got a masterful vocabulary, but that doesn’t mean you need to pull it out and show it off. Your objective is to get your point across, not to dazzle. I was mentally editing some of these books as I read them, because the authors seemed to be writing in what they THOUGHT was a child’s reading level but was really far too complex. My friend’s twins are smart and have good working vocabularies, but they don’t exactly have the reading part down yet. Save the elaborate stuff for a LITTLE later in the process. Don’t scare your readers away by being too complicated too quickly.

Don’t Take Shortcuts

My friend and I were shocked to find the contraction “I’m” in her son’s new book. This was a book geared to beginning readers, just past the “See Spot Run” stage, but well before they’d understand the concept of contractions. It’s one thing to use them when you’re talking, but shouldn’t they learn to read full words first, before they need to learn the shortcuts? Spell out the jargon and acronyms at the beginning to avoid sounding like a code that needs to be broken.

Make it Exciting

Above all, we should be making reading fun, exciting, wonderful. Something to capture imaginations and make pulses race. How else can we initiate non-readers into the wonderful world that words create?

Yes, we are all adults, and most of us write for adults (or near-adults), so you might be thinking, “Why should I care about these tips, Deb? Kids don’t read my web copy.”

The point, though, is that writers LOVE words. We live and breathe them. We notice them when people speak them, we remember them when telling stories. We spot typos in menus and inconsistencies in books. We love the way words play together, create imagery and whole worlds.

Sometimes, though, we get so caught up in the act of writing, we forget that a lot of our readers really just aren’t that interested. How many friends do you have that never pick up a book to read? Who find sitting and reading anything longer than three paragraphs a chore?

Hard as it is for you and me to believe, a lot of people don’t like to read.

It therefore behooves us … we writers whose lives revolve around words … to be ambassadors to those poor benighted folks who simply are not interested. We should be making it easy for them, not hard.