Carnegie medal winner slams children’s book publishers for ‘accessible’ prose | Books | The Guardian

"Most of its tyrannies are brought to bear on younger books right now. But blink twice and today's junior school readers will be in secondary school, armed only with a pocketful of single-syllable words, and with brains far less receptive to the acquisition of vocabulary than when they were three or seven or nine," she said. "Since when has one generation ever doubted and pitied the next so much that it decides not to burden them with the full package of the English language but to feed them only a restricted diet, like poorly patients, of simple words?"