User blog comment:Jkl9817/Jkl's satiric blog post number 4: Story time with Grandpa Gideon/@comment-3432330-20110828162059/@comment-1874924-20110829005822

That, and my richly descriptive writing style. Of course, I've always written for the older kids here. If younger kids can understand my writing, then more power to them. As you saw, the early passages that Grandpa Gideon recited--which are quotes or paraphrases of the actual Legacy text--don't really have that many words that are hard to understand, which I'm sure is part of the joke.

For the record, according to the reading difficulty metrics that MS Word uses, Legacy is written at a 9th-grade reading level. Courtney and the Violin of Despair is rated at a 10th-grade reading level, probably because it has less dialogue.

Since most of the canon TD characters are teenagers, and Chris talks like a teen, I try to write dialogue in a style they would actually speak, so a story with more dialogue would tend to have a lower reading difficulty score than a story with less dialogue. For example, my Fake Souls Heather chapter, which is mostly dialogue, rates at a 6th-grade reading level; whereas my FS Izzy chapter, which has no dialogue at all, rates at a 10th-grade level.