Beyond the grammatical errors, misplaced punctuation and misspellings, and despite the relative novelty of the anecdotes, I thought the writing itself was dull and simplistic. Many paragraphs were just a string of blunt statements without any independent clauses.

According to a copy+paste of the text into http://sarahktyler.com/code/sample.php, the article as a whole reaches Flesch-Kindaid grade level 7.

So, it was written such that a 7th grader could read it. How is that a bad thing?

Edit: I pasted a sample of John D MacDonald in there and it showed a level of 6.61. Poor John, no wonder he was never a success. /S

Your comment isn't really addressing mine from the context in which it was given. My comment was in reply to someone implying criticism of the piece stems from its reading level being above that of a 12 or 13 year old, which isn't the case.

I'm simply proposing that the criticism is founded on actual flaws with the piece, rather than it being too complex to be understood by its detractors.

It was what your comment implied to me - that is some one with a low level of English reading comprehension who needs short simple sentence structure.