A New Writing Task

Over the past few days I've been working on what is one of the toughest writing tasks I've ever attempted. For some this might be easy but for me it is a genuine (and welcome) learning experience.

I was recently contacted by a company that prepares writing tests on fluency and comprehension for Departments of Education over elementary school children in four Southeastern states. They asked for short "stories" of from 100 to a maximum of 175 words, depending on the grade level. I was provided with an online tool to check the reading level of what I would write and I got to work. I began by rewriting a couple of stories I had written in the past just to see how to "downwrite," restructure my writing to a far lower grade level than the one the story had been written for originally. After numerous tries I finally began to get the hang of it but single syllable words don't always get the point across.

I was really surprised when pasting the stories into the program to learn which words scored as difficult. Contractions such as "can't" or "wouldn't" were highlighted for 4th and 5th grade readers. Words such as "feisty" or "territorial" received the same warning score for 6th grade readers. No wonder this country has so many literacy problems! It seems that our children aren't being taught the sort of written language skills needed to comprehend the world around them. Yet I know they hear these words and many more sophisticated ones on TV and in the movies. So what is one to think?

In the meantime I've begun writing new little stories. I think about our daily lives and about things that might interest or inform youngsters, then I craft a lttle story around these things. I'm getting better. Pretty soon I'll be churning them out so fast it might even work out to be worth my while.