Is your writing age-appropriate?

Matching the style to the speaker

I’m currently wrestling with a prologue to my new novel.  I always think a prologue is a bit like a shop window: designed to draw the reader in with the promise of good things to come. I want my prologue to say, Hi you’re in safe hands with me. I will deliver a gripping and moving story; my characters will be believable; my writing will be sophisticated but still easy to follow – trust me and read on! But the problem is, this prologue is told from the perspective of a 12-year-old girl. So, in fact I can’t use lots of long, impressive words, or heightened, sophisticated language, or highly intellectual concepts, or it wouldn’t ring true.  I always think writing from a child’s perspective is much harder than through the eyes of an adult. Fortunately I have a granddaughter aged 12, so I’m going to run the prologue past her and ask if she would write or speak like that. I have no doubt she’ll be completely honest!

But not every writer has a range of different aged children to hand. So what can they do if they want their writing to sound authentic? One option is to use something called the Flesch test. This uses a formula based on sentence length, word length and number of syllables to calculate the readability level of a piece of text. According to this system, J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter books are suitable for twelve-year-olds (in fact my granddaughter is reading them at the moment) so I could read some paragraphs from those novels to help me pitch my prologue. Or I could apply the formula to my own writing and check whether the result makes my prologue plausible from the perspective of a twelve-year-old.

I’d better go and find my calculator!