Mitch Albom Writing at Third Grade Level

I just stumbled on One Minute Book Reviews, a fun new book blog by former NBCC board member Janice Harayada. Among other things, she has this fascinating post, where she uncovers the fact that Mitch Albom actually writes at a third grade level: "I know this," she writes, "because For One More Day struck me as so dumbed-down -- even for Albom -- that it fell below the level of the sixth-grade books I once edited for a test-prep company. So I typed a couple of paragraphs from the novel into my computer and ran the Word spelling and grammar checker, which gives you the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Statistics at the bottom. Albom, it showed, writes at the level of Grade 2.8. This was starling enough that I wondered if the paragraphs I had used, from page 24, were atypical. So I typed in the full text of pages 24 and 25 and found that they were atypical. Albom actually writes at a third-grade level, Grade 3.4, according to Flesch-Kincaid." She also investigated other writers, including Jesus ... check it out.