According to this I write YA stories

I usequestails for her computer geniousness. 

After the Singapore Incident, I went a-searching for online document storage because emailing stories and notes to myself (and backing it all up on three separate flash drives, or posting it and locking it here) didn’t fully satisfy my ocd. I discovered some nicely recommended storage sites, but I’ve successfully locked myself down with anti-malware everything and the sites won’t allow me to upload without turning it off, which I cannot do because something might explode.

So I askedquestails and she put up with my ignorance magnanimously (as always) and said, why don’t you just use the document feature on gmail?

Oh.  

I’ve been playing with gmail docs for a couple weeks now and I love it love it love it. I love that I can email stories in and send draft links without attachments to whomever I want (the rest of you might not share in my ease of sharing). It’s clean text that keeps the style definitions so that I can copy and post without having to fiddle with font, unlike Word 07 which is of the devil, notepad takes too much out, etc.  

Curious about word count last night, I searched around to see if there was any difference between Word and gmail and discovered – my writing is easily understood by the average eleven year old and I typically write at the fourth grade level according to the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Tests. Occasionally, rarely, I step up to the fifth grade level. That puts me about even with Reader’s Digest and a little better than our local disaster of a newspaper. 

I’m sure Word offers the same information, but I never go deeper than the word count at the bottom of the screen. I know the tests don’t qualify as ratings, if it did, my fondness for a certain word that begins with f would push me at least into middle school (where I will eternally remain in heart and action). So, I’m going to be more polysyllabic this week. I’m going to keep tellingquestails that she’s magnanimous, because she is.  Andvictoriawiley, who writes shopping lists at the doctorate level, I’m going to tell her that she’s perspicacious, because that’s why I love her, and with her help I will use more semi-colons and develop complex sentence structures and I will finally understand the past perfect tense. I will try, and fail, to stop beginning sentences with And and But. 

So, using Flesch-Kincaid, who is your target audience?