Strange, however, that Huffington Post's big news stories tend to be complex as well. The Economist, of course, publishes the most complex writing. The top BuzzFeed News article, on the other hand, dealt with weightier subject matter and was more advanced reading (and shared much less). You may not be surprised to learn that the 3rd grade-level BuzzFeed post was the most shared article on the list. Turns out that esoteric vocabulary that you tend to find in fitness and health articles (like the one I sampled for GQ) clocks in at a higher reading level, even if the rest of the prose is simple. I was curious why GQ was more complex than LA Times, and Cosmo less complex than GQ. He does it exceptionally well. Here’s what that looks like in a couple of his recent posts: Klein’s job, like any good reporter, is to take sophisticated information and explain it in a way that a larger audience can understand. Let’s look at Vox’s Ezra Klein, the Washington Post and American Prospect writer who made his mark in the journalism world through the opposite practice. In fact, that's what most business and academic writers still do: they get verbose and pack their work with buzzwords and heavy diction in order to appear trustworthy. (Case in point: Ben Franklin’s autobiography-one of my favorites-is written at a 13th grade level.) In recent years, it seems an increasing number of sophisticated thinkers have intended to reach larger audiences through literary simplification (e.g.: Malcolm Gladwell, one of the smartest people I’ve met, who certainly could write at a 13th grade level but intentionally writes at 8th grade level in order to bring complex ideas to an audience that wouldn’t hang at a higher level.) Yet, school teaches us that higher reading level equals credibility, which is why so many of us try to sound more sophisticated when we speak and write. In eras past, sophisticated writers aimed to entertain and persuade a sophisticated audience with big vocabulary and complex ideas. That's what makes them exceptional. And it gives them a better chance to reach larger audiences. My reading level data verifies that Hemingway, et.
And "fluency" means the reader can get through the writing quickly, without having to think so hard about the words themselves. "Identity" means the reader can relate to the subject or characters. "Novelty," of course, has to do with surprising or new ideas and stories. I recently wrote a post about three important ingredients for “shareable” writing: Novelty, identity, and fluency. We’re trained to think that in school. But data shows the opposite: lower reading level often correlates with commercial popularity and in many cases, how good we think a writer is. Every one of them told me that they assumed that higher reading level meant better writing. I did an informal poll of some friends while writing this post.
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