Today, writers rarely use semicolons, which provide a level of pause between a comma and a period. Authors have declared war on adverbs, forms of the verb to be, or filter words that identify a character’s thoughts. Others want to rid writing of dialog spelled as it sounds. These changes are touted as increasing readability. I suppose the goal is to create text so easy the reader forgets that they are reading.
Despite my experience with a number of classic books written by authors from the British Isles, I don’t recall an overuse of semicolons. But, American author Herman Melville was quite fond of them. I lived through reading his massive tome, Moby-Dick for American Literature class. Despite its 10th grade reading level i and meandering text, this deadly duel between a captain and a white whale captured the attention of America. Moby-Dick remains his most popular work, at least in abridged versions rewritten at a lower reading level.
If you’ re familiar with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (reading level 8th grade), you may grasp the difficulty of understanding regional dialects written as they sound. However, the prize for most incomprehensible regional dialect belongs to Emily Brontë. In Wuthering Heights, the servant Joseph’s words in Yorkshire dialect are unintelligible to at least 95 percent of English speakers today. Ah suppose eur mooar fowk could understan’ it i’ ‘a tahhm. (Yorkshire for “I suppose more people could understand it in her time.”) I read Wuthering Heights with footnotes translating this brogue into English received pronunciation. Later editions (reading level 6th grade) revised this servant’s dialogue within the body of the novel.
In the United States today, far more people can read than during the lives of these three authors. However, adult literacy is in decline.
In the United States today, far more people can read than during the lives of these three authors. However, adult literacy started its decline around 2005 ii before the COVID virus. Prior rates fell below the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) international average. iii Still, the recommended readability level when writing for the general public in the U.S. is seventh to eighth grade.
Evidently, the New York Times best-selling authors are not writing for the general public. Ben Blatt has researched statistics on each New York Times bestseller from 1960 to 2014. The eighth grade was the median reading level for these best sellers in 1960. Today that level is sixth grade. The largest number of bestsellers fall into either the thriller or romance category. Since the 2000s increasing numbers of novels in these two genres are written at sixth grade level or below. iv
Writers might have more to worry about than semicolons, passive tense, and adverbs.
Photo by K.N. Listman
- [i] Learner Books provided the reading level for each of these novels.
- https://lernerbooks.com/faqs#:~:text=Reading%20levels%20are%20determined%20by,text%20length%2C%20and%20other%20factors.
- [ii] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=69
- [iii] https://www.wyliecomm.com/2021/08/whats-the-latest-u-s-literacy-rate/
- [iv] https://www.rd.com/article/have-bestsellers-become-dumber/#:~:text=As%20part%20of%20my%20research,did%20all%20of%20these%20bestsellers.
Write about what? 
Readability was a common subject when I was member of some writing groups. One group wrote a book that included input of all members (all of us were post high school adults) each writing a chapter or two. Some writers were sophisticated; others were not. Overall, the book was disjointed as the chapters didn’t go together. The book was scrapped and never published, though I have a copy because I was a contributor. That was twenty years ago and it’s still embarrassing to read the chapters written by writers who wrote at levels that are at low grade levels. For me, it speaks volumes about writers who want to learn how to write well (and read well) and those who simply want to write (and read) anything that doesn’t make them research and learn.