For the past few weeks my Small but Faithful Readership has listened to me bitching about the story re-telling project I’ve been working on for the Holt, Rinehart adaptive readers, so today I thought to let you all have a look at before-and-afters of one of them. The example I chose is Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,” because (1) it’s in the public domain, and (2) it was difficult to do because of Poe’s ornate language use.
The original story runs to 6,100 words; the re-telling I turned in this afternoon had 1,216, and it may lose another hundred to two hundred words during editing. I had done an initial re-telling of it last fall as an “audition” for the project, and I got it down to about 4,400 words then. It was this partially-edited story that I came back to when I began work this morning.
Poe’s original story scores a 70.1 on the Flesch Reading Ease scale, and a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 7.3; my version scores Reading Ease of 85.9 and a grade level of 4.4. (For reading ease, higher numbers are supposed to be better; work the grade levels out for yourself.)
When you read my re-telling, don’t expect to find something very similar to Poe. It’s not supposed to be similar. My target audience are urban tenth-graders who are reading anywhere from two to six grade levels below their actual grade level. I’m taking out a lot. However, it may be instructive to see how we do what we do. I’m also expecting that my stories will go into a California or Indiana edition textbook, and not a Texas edition. A couple of the stories I’ve worked on are ones I doubt would get past Mel and Norma Gabler.
A quick count just told me that I’ve handled 50,000 words this month, cutting them down to a little more than 18,000, and as few of them my own as I could manage. That’s a lot.
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