Why I Write for 12-Year-Olds

I’m not writing YA nonfiction. I just don’t want to limit my audience by turning people off.

The average 20-year-old American supposedly knows about 42,000 English words, by one count. This is a hard thing to determine, so other estimates vary. This tally excludes proper nouns and “derived words” like "helplessly," from "help"), per a write-up in Science. It’s a spectrum, of course: 20-year-olds in the Top 5% know around 52,000 words, and those…