Maturity Rating and Reading Levels
What Are Maturity Ages and Read Grades?
There is no uniform rating system for written words, including blogs or books. Per the Terms of Use, this site is not for children. Mature content requires login to minimize access by minors. In some instances, login prevents readers from prematurely reading the non-mature conclusion of a multi-part story.
Flagging content as “mature” has a broad range of applications. It may pertain to anatomical subject matter, dialogue, and/or imagery. To provide readers with more context, at the top of some articles, there is a minimum maturity age and/or a read grade.
The author or editor determines the subjective minimum maturity age of the audience, ranging between 12 and 21. A commercial grammar app determines the read grade level (2–14) based on sentence structure and number of polysyllabic words. (There are 90 possible combinations.)
The maturity level is subjective. Adults have variable maturity and reading levels. This site makes no claim of content suitable for minors. Parents or legal guardians can determine the appropriateness of material suggesting maturity below the age of majority.
The range of fictional story themes remains tangentially related to health while appealing to different audiences. Within these miniseries, different episodes may vary in grade level among episodes. The initial maturity age and reading grade are an average of the series.
Factors affecting higher grade recommendations include psychological trauma, discussion of sexual matters, or brief violent situations. Thrillers include death or the eminent fear of such. There is no profanity within articles on this website.
The vocabulary of some information is written at an adult reading level. Hence, it may not be suitable for children even though there is nothing particularly objectionable to children.
What is the Optimum Reading Level?
The average American has a readability level equivalent to a 7th or 8th grader (12–14 years old). [1] Blogs written at lower-grade reading levels typically get more attention. [2] Author, Charlotte E. English, makes this distinction within the reference What Makes a Book Readable [3]:
- 1/3 of adults read at a 2nd–6th grade reading level
- 1/3 read at a 7th–12th grade reading level
- 1/3 read at college levels
So, a reading grade level of about 5 accommodates most readers. By way of comparison, the “Jack and Jill” nursery rhyme is a grade-1 reading level. The typical PubMed article is grade 13, 14, or even post-graduate.
The level of some articles on this site can be lower to appeal to a wider audience. It may also represent the limited education of prominent characters within a story.
What is a Cameo?
Below some article titles and also within the footer you may sometimes see the word “cameo.” This can refer to your first name substitution for one of the characters within a story.
Cameo may also refer to gender-based content personalization. This site uses a combination of heuristics and manual flagging to determine gender. Ambiguous names may cause errors. These customizations occur only when logged in and do not affect audio. Upon your request, this feature can be disabled for your user account.
ClinicalNovellas Special Features
As the number of short stories and novellas grows, they can appear within more logical categories. Miniseries begin with the premiere. For simplification, when clicking genres on the main ClinicalNovellas page or within breadcrumbs at the top of the article, results filter for premiere+mystery, or whichever other genre you select.
Though most thrillers are also mysteries, not all mysteries are thrillers. A mystery can also be a drama. So some stories will appear in more than one genre.
Clicking the ClinicalNovellas logo (ClinicalNovellas.com) presents you with every available premiere. Miniseries include a tiny multi-page icon in the upper left corner of the preview image. You can click the page count below the description to see all available episodes in the series.
Short stories are three episodes or less. When they are a single episode, there is no icon in the upper left corner. Below the description is the suggested minimum maturity age. Click that to see all premieres recommended for that age group.
ClinicalNovellas include enhanced audio. This means there are different voices for narration and characters. There may also be sound effects, which can lengthen read-time estimates. All these enhancements, plus images bring stories to life when logged in.
References
- What is readability and why should content editors care about it? centerforplainlanguage.org/what-is-readability/
- Blogs Written at a 5th Grade Reading Level are Better? linkedin.com/pulse/blogs-written-5th-grade-reading-level-better-drew-schmitz
- What Makes a Book Readable? charlotteenglish.com/2012/03/what-makes-a-book-readable/