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Research Says Mr Greedy as Complex as Of Mice and Men

By March 6, 2019Children's Literature, News

Research by Renaissance UK has found that Roger Hargreaves’ Mr Greedy is only slightly easier to read than John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. The children’s book, alongside other Mr Men favourites has been declared harder to read than Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox.

All the books were rated by Renaissance UK, which analysis text complexity. Of the books rated, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, first published in 1726 was rated the hardest to read on the complexity scale. Renaissance UK examined more than 33,000 books for children and young adults, scanning each page and taking into consideration things like sentence length, average word length, and the difficulty level of each word.

The study found that while Mr Men books look easy and simple they are actually at a really high difficulty level.

Renaissance UK is a reliable source, used by teachers to find the right books for pupils, the company rate books on a scale of 0.2 (easiest) to 13.5 (hardest) and created these lists in time for World Book Day on 7th March. On the scale, Mr Greedy was rated at 4.4, while Of Mice and Men was rated 4.6, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Grapes of Wrath was rated slightly higher at 4.9.

Here are the top 10 hardest and easiest books according to this scale.

Top 10 ‘hardest’ books

Gulliver’s Travels (Unabridged) by Jonathan Swift
Don Quixote (Unabridged) by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories by Washington Irving
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
Vanity Fair by William M. Thackeray
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal

Top 10 ‘easiest’ books

Bad Bat by Laura Hambleton
No, Sid, No! by Kate Scott
The Go-Kart by Roderick Hunt
The Magic Egg by Vivian French
Sam and the Nut by Sheryl Webster
Bess and Tess by Susan Blackaby
Best Bird by Laura Hambleton
Cat and Dog in a Mess by Shoo Rayner



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