Don't Write Down to Kids by David Farland

In Farland's weekly e-newsletter "The Daily Kick," he talked about why not to write down to kids. His advice was so wise I'm quoting it here, with a suggestion that every serious writer sign-up for this free newsletter. It's a gem and will richly reward the few moments it takes to get on Farland's list:
 
Years ago I was invited to Disney World to do some interviews. My family was flown first-class, and we stayed at the resort for a week—all paid for by the Mouse. All that I had to do was go down to the park for a couple of hours on two mornings and do some radio interviews to talk about new attractions at the theme park.
In one interview, I was talking to kids on the Disney Channel, being interviewed by a child reporter. The producer stopped the taping on two occasions and said, “First rule: don’t talk down to the kids.” You see, if you’re an adult and you’re not used to talking to children, you tend to speak in a falsetto. You intentionally dummy down your vocabulary and begin speaking in small sentences.
In short, you try to sound like a kid. Don’t do it.
Now, this advice will run counter to that of many people in the field who will tell you, “You can’t use big words with middle-grade or young adult audiences!” There are even lists of “approved” words.
Yet I believe for some very good reasons that this is the wrong tact to take. I can’t get into all of the reasons in a forum this short, but I’ll elaborate on our next outing.
So here’s my advice, even when writing for very young readers: forget the lists, at least on your first draft. In that draft, write as if you were writing for your intellectual equals. This will help you avoid dummying the work down for artificial reasons.
Now, let’s be honest. Most kids don’t have the vocabulary that adults do. According to an article that I read years ago, the average person has a vocabulary of 10,000 words that they use frequently. Another 10,000 might be used infrequently. But a six-year-old might have a vocabulary of only 2,000 words.
So you’ll want to limit your vocabulary eventually. You can always go back, have some children of the appropriate age read your work, and make adjustments based upon that. When writing for middle-grades, I hired my children to read the books and edit them by circling any words that they didn’t know. Neighbor kids did the same.
I found that when I exposed a child to an unfamiliar word, I could almost always remedy the problem by defining it for them within the text. But I left some words intentionally, so that kids could look the words up on their own, and grow their vocabulary.
Remember what I said about Rowling’s sentence structure and language? She writes well above her audience’s grade-level. That’s all right.
I’m going to tell you a secret that many editors haven’t figured out yet: kids will read what they want. If the story intrigues them enough, they’ll struggle to read above their own grade level.
I once had a small girl, four years old, ask me to sign my Star Wars book, THE COURTSHIP OF PRINCESS LEIA. I asked if she planned to read it someday, and she said in a haughty tone, “I’ve already read it three times. It’s my favorite book!” Her mother told me that she had seen it on the shelf at the bookstore at age three and said, “I want to learn to read, and I want to read that book.” Her mother read it to her once, helped her read through the first three, chapters, and then the three-year-old girl took off and taught herself to read.
This happens over and over. My youngest son Ben set a goal of reading a thousand books in Kindergarten. I helped him through them—all picture books. By the middle of the year, he was reading at a sixth-grade level.
I typically visit schools and talk to about 25,000 children per year. In every third-grade class, about 25% of the kids are reading adult fantasy—EREGON, HARRY POTTER, LORD OF THE RINGS, Terry Brooks, and so on. Do you really think those kids are reading at third-grade level?
No, the truth is that some kids often learn to love reading at an early age. As soon as they do, they begin increasing their skills rapidly. The little things that slowed them down are easily overcome. For example, I recently read with a child who came across the word goon, and read it as “Go-on.” I corrected him, and within a few pages I found that he was taking time to think about the words he was reading, to sound them out better in his head, and perhaps as many as 70% of his errors disappeared in that one outing.
So those third-graders who love to read quickly begin reading at a sixth-grade level, while the children next to them, those who haven’t caught the bug, may still only be reading at a first-grade level.
The children who will buy your books are the ones who love to read. They’ll recommend them to their friends, and those kids will struggle to raise their reading skill in order to share the enjoyment of your book. At least, that was my theory when I advised Scholastic to begin pushing Harry Potter, despite its apparent problems. I’m going to explain a much more powerful reason why you shouldn’t dumb the books down on our next outing.
So when writing to those kids, don’t dumb your books down! Studies show that science fiction readers read well above their level, and as a result have higher IQ’s than people who don’t read science fiction. I’ve known many a science fiction fan who will point this out with pride. But the truth is that any child who loves to read anything—cookbooks, adventure stories, historicals—will soon read well above their normal grade level and get that same boost in IQ. It’s not that science fiction readers are smarter than other people, it’s that avid READERS OF ANYTHING will score higher on such tests.