Up Your Reading Game

We live in a marvelous, brave new world. Except for the parts that suck. There’s plenty written about the sucky parts. I even write about them.

There’s also plenty of writing advice out there. Some of it sucks, too.

This article is not superfluous writing advice. It is adulation for our techy, brave new world, and an admonishment of those writers and readers who won’t lift a finger to use it. It’s also an exposé of the worst and most dated writing advice.

The most egregious writing advice dates back to paper newspapers. Maybe even to the hieroglyphs, although presumably ancient Egyptians didn’t have public schools with grade levels.

The advice?

“Write on a fifth grade reading level.”

This made some sense in ancient times — when I was growing up, for instance.

Not every home had a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica. Don’t know what that was? Look it up.

Not even every home had a dictionary. Although for those of us who played Scrabble for blood, a dictionary was a necessity to temporarily end the mayhem and prevent fratricide. Or is it sororicide?

In those long-ago days, when you played a word in Scrabble — that you made up but tried to play off as real — a sibling could challenge the word and look it up in the dictionary. If it was fake, you had to take it off the board and lose your turn. I am using “you” to reference me.

On the other hand, if you knew a word your overly competitive, blood-thirsty, equally word-savvy siblings did NOT know, and the dictionary backed you up, you were King or Queen of Scrabble — at least until the next person pulled wordy magic out of the top hat of their nerdy, brainiac brains.

I digress.

The point is, when writing was printed on paper, for the masses who may or may not have had access to bulky dictionaries, or monstrous collections of encyclopedias, writing at a 5th-grade level made sense. You didn’t want readers to stop in their visual tracks and wrap their garbage in the newspaper before finishing reading the story with your byline.

I never did that, but I’ve heard it was a thing. Not bylines — I had those. Wrapping garbage in newspaper.

I did line bird cages with newspapers, but only after I finished reading them front page to back page. Which occasionally required a dictionary at hand. Especially when doing the New York Times crossword during breakfast in bed. No, not in ink.

Back to our present and future. We now have word definitions at our fingertips. Literally. On a Kindle reader or the phone, which we all know is actually a tiny, handheld computer, we can press our finger on the word and choose “Define” or “Translate.” On the computer, you highlight the word and select “Define.” Again, using fingertips on the keys and control pad.

There’s no putting down your reading material, schlepping over to the bookshelf, dragging out a 5-pound book, looking the word up alphabetically, putting the dictionary back, schlepping back over to your book/newspaper/magazine, and resuming reading.

With the flash of a blue highlight, you have the world and its multitude of words at your feet. Or your eyes.

There is no more need for writing at a 5th-grade level. And so I will not.

Not just will not — cannot.

Know what my sisters and I did before there were computers that fit in our hands, when there were only 3 TV channels, and we ran out of books while the library was closed?

Yep, you guessed it. We read the dictionary. We looked up and hoarded words for the next Scrabble game. Or to use in conversation with one another, the only people with whom we could use ‘cacophonous’ or ‘farciloquence’ or even ‘argle-bargle.’ We had our own secret language that only other weird dictionary readers could understand.

And now, all those words I stocked up on need an outlet. They send up a cacophony of pleading to be set free upon the digital page. They don’t want to be argle-bargle. They want to enlighten, not discombobulate. They want to adorn writing that is eellogofusciouhipoppokunurious.

Therefore, my writing will ring out with lamprophony.

What do all those words mean? You know I’m not going to tell you. Don’t sprain your fingertips looking them up. I’ll wait.

Octothorpe: notwritingatfifthgradelevel

Much adulation to the obsequious — as in always welcome — magical editor fairy, Holly J See, AKA editor fairy. And to the MuddyUm AI that some of you think is really Andrew Rodwin. See what a magical, fantastical, artificially intelligent world we inhabit?

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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