The Myth of Reading Ages

As adults, we're expected to read the world fluently. Contracts. Ballots. Instructions. Social inclusion means being good at reading, but words are rocky ground; some slip away, others trip you up.

The NHS says the average reading age in the UK is nine. Just nine. Think about everything that you didn't know when you were nine. English has many hundreds of thousands of words, and many of them are words that most people never use. There are so many English words, in fact, that no one knows how many there are. Yet official letters and websites are often written as if everyone were born with a built-in dictionary.

That belief is misplaced. We all read differently. A data analyst might glide through spreadsheets but stall over a tenancy agreement. A poet might feel at home in complex metaphors but freeze at a tax return. Reading age shifts with context, confidence, and familiarity.

Thus, 'reading age' isn't a single metric for someone's reading competence, but a variable and subjective measure that indicates in only the roughest terms how well someone reads. And, even then, the real problem is the notion that, simply because someone can read something, they can understand it easily.

A 15-year-old physics student may have the reading age typical of a 15-year-old, but pitching a textbook at their age level makes the central challenge of understanding one of language — of the words that you think you know, but you're not quite sure about — and not the content. Comprehension of the underlying idea shouldn't depend on fighting through the language to reach the meaning.

There's a difference between a text that is hard to read and one that is hard to think about. The first is fundamentally in the writer's control; the second is much harder to change. Indeed, the more complex the subject, the greater the need for clear, accessible language, to reduce the overall burden of complexity and to allow the reader to devote themselves entirely to the concept, not the words chosen to describe it.

In this sense, you might think of reading ages like speed limits. Just because you can drive at forty miles per hour, it doesn't mean you should. The closer you go to the limit, the more likely you are to go too fast, too high. And the more challenging the road, the slower you should drive. Writing more simply — using Easy Read principles or plain language — is like slowing down. It gives you the space to understand and reduces the risks of miscomprehension.

Accessible writing helps everyone, not only those with lower literacy. It means picturing where your reader might be, from the parent trying to read a letter in the noise and clatter of breakfast, to the carer checking an online form between shifts or in flickering light on the bus. Clear, simple writing saves time and reduces mistakes.

And it doesn't only mean helping the reader, either. Mistakes and confusion are costly on both sides of communication. In many bureaucratic situations, getting the gist isn't enough. Skipping one line in a hospital letter might mean missing an appointment or arriving unprepared.

Those costs ripple outward. A missed appointment wastes the patient's time, the clinician's time, and someone else's chance to be seen. Missed NHS appointments alone cost more than a billion pounds each year. Many of those who miss them do so because they never understood when they were meant to attend, and not through laziness or forgetfulness. According to one blog from 2023, almost a quarter of missed sessions were skipped because the patient never knew they had an appointment.

This is a hidden problem. People mask their struggles. They nod along in meetings, ask a friend to explain a form, pretend to follow. Literacy only becomes visible when it fails, and by then it is often too late.

And yet it happens to everyone. Not long ago, it happened to me. I went to my local council office to give notice. I'd checked online for what I'd need to bring. I'd double-, triple-, quadruple-checked the council's webpage. I brought with me a wallet full of information, identity documents, and more. Within five minutes of the appointment starting, I was on my way home. I'd taken several things I didn't need, but I was missing one essential document.

Relaying this story to a friend, he told me he'd had the same experience. We're both adults, and we're both strong readers, or so we thought, but we'd both fundamentally misunderstood public-facing information.

That small mistake cost hours of my time, and wasted an appointment that someone else might have better used. And it had happened before. Anyone can make a mistake, but organisations are responsible for giving their users every chance to avoid those errors.

It pays to consider reading ages as a ceiling, not a goal. For informative writing, everything you do to reduce the complexity of your content has very real consequences for the people you hope to reach. It may be the difference between them grasping your information immediately or turning away from you or your service out of anxiety or frustration.

The work of inclusion is often quiet. Yet its rewards are loud: fewer mistakes, fairer systems, and a language that welcomes everyone in.