Subjective quality of writing, and objective quality of communication, don’t correlate all that well with reading level. Pretty much all the popular readability formulas use fairly simple functions of sentence length and percentage of hard words (i.e. not on a minimal vocabulary list), so prioritizing clarity and accessibility will tend to push readability scores down.
I just ran an arbitrary selection of articles from the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle through a Dale-Chall readability metric here; the results varied between 9th grade and a college sophomore level, with a median of about 11th grade. The most recent chapter of Luminosity scores at 9th or 10th grade level, while the most recent chapter of MoR lies at 7th-8th.
Subjective quality of writing, and objective quality of communication, don’t correlate all that well with reading level. Pretty much all the popular readability formulas use fairly simple functions of sentence length and percentage of hard words (i.e. not on a minimal vocabulary list), so prioritizing clarity and accessibility will tend to push readability scores down.
I just ran an arbitrary selection of articles from the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle through a Dale-Chall readability metric here; the results varied between 9th grade and a college sophomore level, with a median of about 11th grade. The most recent chapter of Luminosity scores at 9th or 10th grade level, while the most recent chapter of MoR lies at 7th-8th.