Edit for Facts and Reading Level
Five Steps towards Polishing your Novel for Kids
How to edit your book for children, focusing on fact checking and reading level.
The first article in this series of three showed you how to edit for Form and Structure. This one gives the next five steps by showing you how to edit for facts and inconsistencies, and how to tell if your story is set at the right literacy level for your intended readership.
- Go through the text looking for inconsistencies. Has a character left on holiday in Chapter Two, but reappeared without explanation in Chapter Ten? Is it Tuesday on page one, but after two nights sleep still only Wednesday?
- Have you put a cherry tree filled with juicy cherries in an area where cherries don’t grow? Check all your facts? When writing for children the smallest details matter. There is always a high achieving fifth grader somewhere with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject who will send you a letter putting you right.
- Is the vocabulary and sentence structure suitable to your designated age group? Children like a challenge, but if the story is about nine year olds, remember it will be read by seven to nine year olds. (This is because children don’t like reading about kids younger than themselves.) If the vocabulary, complexity of plot and sentence structure is better suited to ten to twelve year olds, they will battle with it and probably give up. Online you can find comprehensive guides to what educators expect children in each age group to be able to read. Keeping this in mind as you edit will bring huge rewards. If publishers know you have done your homework and your story will go down well in schools, they will be much keener to publish it.
- The best way to find out if your story appeals to the age group you have written for is to test it on children you don’t know. Ask the English Teacher or librarian at your local school if you can read it to one of the classes. Children sometimes try to spare your feelings or want to win marks, so they may say they love your story. Don’t listen to their words as much as their body language. If, while you are reading, the class is fiddling with their books, sharpening pencils, shuffling feet or even coughing a lot, they are bored. Keep a pencil on hand while you read, and mark the text when they become restless. Back home you know you need to cut back the text and increase the drama of this passage. If you also mark the areas where they are engrossed, you will learn a lot by comparing your writing in these different areas.
- At the end of a chapter take a break from reading and ask some comprehension questions. You’ll be surprised at what they grasp and which facts have eluded them. If the facts they are unsure about are important to the storyline, go back later to these sections and expand on them in the text. Sometimes concepts which are familiar to adults are alien to children and need a little bit of explanation.
Completed these steps? Read the last article in this series of three, Shaping the Text.
The copyright of the article Edit for Facts and Reading Level in Writing for Children is owned by Helen Brain. Permission to republish Edit for Facts and Reading Level must be granted by the author in writing.
