English prose has become much easier to read. But shorter sentences had little to with it.
‘A sentence should not have more than ten or twelve words.’ VS Naipaul’s first rule for good writing is a popular one. From Hemingway’s legion of admirers, to Grammarly, to countless books and internet memes about writing well, the idea that shorter sentences are better is dominant. Many people go further, arguing that one of the most important changes in English over time is its sentences getting shorter.
This has been a standard modern academic account of English prose, from Edwin H Lewis’s 1894 book The History of the English Paragraph to recent dataset analyses. Arjun Panickssery recently argued that English sentences got shorter over time and that ‘shorter sentences reflect better writing’.
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The Elizabethans and Victorians wrote long tangled sentences that resembled the briars growing underneath Sleeping Beauty’s tower. Today we write like Hemingway. Short. Sharp. Readable. Pick up an old book and the sentences roll on. Go to the office, read the paper, or scroll Twitter and they do not. So it is said. I would like to suggest that this account is incomplete.
I propose a different story. The great shift in English prose took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, probably driven by the increasing use of writing in commercial contexts, and by the style of English in post-Reformation Christianity. It consisted in two things: a ‘plain style’ and logical syntax. A second, smaller shift has taken place in modern times, in which written English came to be modelled more closely on spoken English.
What this should demonstrate is that shortness is the wrong dimension to investigate. We think we are looking at a language that got simpler; in fact we are looking at one that has created huge variation in what it can express and how, by adding new ways of writing. Lots of English writing has got simpler through use of the plain style, sticking to a logical shared syntax, especially the syntax of speech. But all the other ways of writing are still there, often showing up when we don’t expect them.
What is a sentence?
We often talk as though a sentence is just the words and characters between two full stops (periods). But when grammarians refer to a ‘sentence’ they mean something with a certain structure of ‘syntax’. By this way of thinking, a sentence is an independent clause, also known as a main clause. A main clause has a subject and a predicate. The subject is the thing performing the action. The predicate is the verb (the action) and the object (the thing receiving the action).
Instead of:
Man dog walk. Boy biscuit eat. Girl throw ball.
We write:
The man walked the dog. The boy ate the biscuit. The girl threw the ball.
The first three sentences are clearly incorrect, and we would not expect to read them in normal English. So, a sentence is not just words with a full stop. A sentence is a syntactical structure, most commonly that of subject-verb-object. The man (subject) walked (verb) the dog (object). This is the nucleus, onto which many other modifying slots can be added.
Sentences can be simple (one main clause), compound (two or more main clauses linked with a conjunction), complex (a main clause with dependent clauses, i.e. clauses that cannot stand alone), or complex-compound (one or more dependent clauses and two or more main clauses).
These complex sentences below have both a main clause and a dependent clause. The commas aren’t optional: changing them for full stops would make it impossible to know what was being said.
The man walked the dog, who lingered.
Before running inside to her irritated mother, the girl threw the ball.
Hiding behind the door, the boy ate the biscuit.
Complexity is added by the number of ideas we progress through, and the way we progress through them, not the lengths of sentences.
Before running inside to her irritated mother, the girl threw the ball.
The girl threw the ball. Then she went inside. Her mother sounded irritated.
Is the second so much easier to read? Perhaps a little, but if so, not much. Here’s the opening paragraph of the first article in the New York Times on 3 May 2025.
Dr. Alan Garber, president of Harvard, disagrees with President Trump about many things. He is fighting Mr. Trump as the federal government tries to strip Harvard of billions of dollars in research funding and its nonprofit tax status.
This could be rewritten to make the sentences shorter.
Dr. Alan Garber is Harvard’s President. He is resisting President Trump. The federal government wants to remove Harvard’s research funding and its nonprofit tax status. That would be a loss of billions of dollars.
The second example here works fine, but the final sentence would actually be clearer if it were a sub-clause in the previous sentence, not a stand alone one. Just because a sentence gets shorter, doesn’t mean it gets better, simpler, or easier to read.
The example I gave above (Before running inside to her irritated mother…) is a left-branching sentence. All the information at the start is subordinate to the main clause. Once the nucleus of the main clause is established (the girl threw the ball), the sentence can be expanded in different directions (the subclause ‘before running inside…’ could also go after the main clause), modifiers can be dropped in (the girl threw the red ball), and so on. Some people think these are difficult sentences. You have to remember all that non-essential stuff before the piece gets to ‘the point’. But the New York Times goes on to use just such a sentence that works perfectly well.
In one of the rare interviews he has given since Harvard began its battle with the federal government, Dr. Garber said this week that Harvard has a campus culture problem that needs urgent fixing.
What you put in the sentence matters just as much as how complex the sentence structure is. For example, one study found that while sentence length has decreased in scientific papers, noun phrases have become far more complicated. Even simple sentences are hard to read when they are full of compounded jargon. You can restrict yourself to ten or twelve words, but still use unnecessary, distracting ones.
Compare Milton Friedman,
There is wide agreement about the major goals of economic policy: high employment, stable prices, and rapid growth. There is less agreement that these goals are mutually compatible or, among those who regard them as incompatible, about the terms at which they can and should be substituted for one another.
To James Joyce,
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.
To Barbara Vinken,
The work of the text is to literalize the signifiers of the first encounter.
These examples show: first, punctuation can dramatically affect measured length without affecting complexity; second, even given this, shorter sentences are not always simpler or easier to read; and third, that the range of variation in the complexity of a sentence of a given length is so large that length is probably a bad measure of complexity. To understand what makes modern prose simple and readable, we need to look elsewhere.
Shorter sentences or just different punctation?
We use full stops (periods) to break up (whole, independent) clauses now, instead of colons and semicolons. The distance between full stops is often shorter. But the complexity of thought patterns across a paragraph is often not. (According to one dataset, semicolon usage has declined from one every 90 words in 1781 to one in every 390 words today.)
Here’s an illustration. In the past, my last few sentences might have been punctuated something like this.
We use full stops (periods) to break up clauses now, instead of colons and semicolons; the distance between full stops is often shorter; but the complexity of thought patterns across a paragraph is not: according to one dataset, semicolon usage has reduced from one every 90 words in 1781 to one in every 390 words today.
This set of thoughts isn’t much more difficult to read when punctuated as one long sentence. If you count the number of words between the capital letter and the full stop, you will come up with the ingredients for a theory that sentences got shorter, perhaps under the selection pressure of modern technology and expanded readership. But once you see that the punctuation makes relatively little difference to the overall complexity of these clauses, you might account for the progress of prose differently.
Shorter and shorter
This fact about punctuation means that most data on sentence length should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Every study is vulnerable to this point, from the standard account (Edwin Lewis) to recent empirical work. For example, one study looked at 1,157 texts on Project Gutenberg between 1820-1940; average sentence length went from the mid thirties to the high teens. This study is just one of a swathe finding similar results.
These histograms show that these averages hide some variation: while there are many shorter sentences, there are also many long ones.
Examples of prose, past and present, illustrate that short prose isn’t always modern, that long sentences aren’t always difficult to read, and that short sentences aren’t always easy.
Compare the sentences from the New York Times above to this from Bagehot’s English Constitution.
‘On all great subjects,’ says Mr. Mill, ‘much remains to be said,’ and of none is this more true than of the English Constitution. The literature which has accumulated upon it is huge. But an observer who looks at the living reality will wonder at the contrast to the paper description. He will see in the life much which is not in the books; and he will not find in the rough practice many refinements of the literary theory.
These are nice, simple sentences that break the supposed pattern of ‘Victorian equals complicated’, ‘modern equals simple.’ Even Samuel Johnson, master of the long sentence, frequently writes short, as here, from Idler 103.
Value is more frequently raised by scarcity than by use. That which lay neglected when it was common, rises in estimation as its quantity becomes less. We seldom learn the true want of what we have till it is discovered that we can have no more.
Here is the opening paragraph of Onyx Storm, the 2025 fantasy romance novel that has sold tens of millions of copies.
Where in Malek’s name is he going? I hurry through the tunnels beneath the quadrant, trying to follow, but night is the ultimate shadow and Xaden blends seamlessly into the darkness. If it wasn’t for our dragons’ bond leading me in his general direction and the sporadic disappearance of mage lights, I’d never think that he’s masked somewhere ahead of me.
Two of those sentences are twenty-four and thirty words long.
The thirty word sentence has a subordinate clause at the start (If it wasn’t for our dragons’ bond…) which is twice as long as the main clause (I’d never think …). (This is left-branching.) This length is, in the opening of an incredibly popular modern book, the exact opposite of what we might expect if we thought length was the key driver of popular readability. It’s simple not because it is short, but because the language is plain and the narrative demands little of us. ‘Malek’, ‘masked’, and ‘mage lights’ may be unfamiliar, but hurrying through tunnels, night as a shadow, blending into darkness, these are tropes, clichés, easy to read. The sentences are longer than average, maybe twice as long or more, but they are full of easy matter.
Simplicity is about more than sentence length.
The story of English syntax
In his History of the English Language, GL Brook describes the differences between Old English (the language of the Saxons and Beowulf) and Modern English (which we use and which has been in use for some four hundred years). He said that Old English was like a natural succession of images, where Modern English is more logical, always making the relationship between ideas clear.
Prose has evolved from being more impressionistic to being more logical. Shakespeare wrote ‘This was the most unkindest cut of all.’ This sounds like a mistake to us: modern English wouldn’t tolerate that sort of tautology in the name of emphasis. Another difference is that Old English was heavily inflected – for instance, verbs had many more different endings depending on tense and person – whereas Modern English relies more on word order. Write like Yoda, we cannot.
The importance of logical order to modern English is summed in Jonathan Swift’s maxim: ‘proper words in proper places make the true definition of style’.
Or, as Adam Smith put it: ‘Our words must be put in such order that the meaning of the sentence shall be quite plain and not depend on the accuracy of the printer in placing the points, or of readers in laying the emphasis on any certain word.’
Consider the famous reminder of native English speakers’ strong sense of intuitive word order: we all know that you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife, but that any change of the order there makes the writer sound crazy. Rules like this, especially the introduction of the sentence, are the first key reason that writing is easier to read today. If something doesn’t start a sentence, then we know to compartmentalize until the sentence gets going.
Whether a sentence is long or short, simple or complicated, it has to be logical. That is why the examples above show that sometimes longer sentences are really quite simple for us to read. Syntax demands comprehension. (JS Mill went so far as to say, in his Aberdeen lecture about education, that grammar is ‘the most elementary part of logic. It is the beginning of the analysis of the thinking process.’)
From periods to sentences
In the earliest English writing, prose relied on rhetorical periods instead of more complex syntactic structures. Rhetorical periods are discrete units of meaning that form the building blocks of sentences, and begin, develop, and return to closure within a single breath. This stands in opposition to the nested, syntactical diction Aristotle described as ‘strung together’ where it goes on and on. Periodic writing is organized into segments, usually by rhythm.
Aristotle preferred periodic diction, which he believed was easier to understand and remember. In the sort of periodic diction Aristotle was writing about, periods contained clauses (cola). Typically these clauses were balanced: they contained ideas and images that either paralleled each other or contrasted with each other. (To show you what that means, I just did it: ‘ideas/images’, ‘parallel/contrast’.)
To see what I mean, look at this example from Coverdale’s Psalm 100 from the 1530s.
O go your way in to his gates with thanks giving, and in to his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and speak good of his name.
For the Lord is gracious, his mercy is everlasting: and his truth endureth from generation to generation.
The full stops mark the verse as the period (each made of two cola, separated by colons). These are not sentences as we know them, like the examples earlier in this piece, which are organized around a nucleus; they are sentences made up of lots of balanced periods. (His gates and his courts, be thankful and speak, gracious and mercy.)
Caedmon’s Hymn is similar. And the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle doesn’t often relate subordinate clauses to main clauses, preferring to string main clauses together (When…then…and…). It is a language of periods, but not of a recognisable modern syntax.
In early English, these periods were not separated by punctuation, but more often by rhythm. Pauses were rhetorical, not grammatical. Often clauses were of the same length; words, sounds, and cadences corresponded. It was not all organized around the nucleus of the main verb: instead groups of breath and groups of sense were similar. So although it was like Aristotle’s second idea of diction, since it was organized into subsections, it was not as tightly organized as modern English sentences, where the ordering of ideas relative to the main verb creates a hierarchy of interpretation.
Modern English emerges with bibles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
Now look at this from the King James Version of the Bible, from seventy years later, 1611.
Then Peter, filled with the Holy Ghost, said unto them, Ye rulers of the people, and elders of Israel,
if we this day be examined of the good deed done to the impotent man, by what means he is made whole;
be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel, that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom ye crucified, whom God raised from the dead, even by him doth this man stand here before you whole.
In this prose, pauses continue to be used for breath, as in the Anglo-Saxon chronicles and Coverdale’s Psalms, but are also used to mark the end of a conceptual idea: of a subject-verb-object sentence. Modern syntax has emerged. In The Establishment of Modern English Prose, Ian Robinson argues that syntactic sentences became predominant in the early modern period.
William Tyndale was essential to the way prose developed. His Bible translations, from a similar time to Coverdale in 1526 for the New Testament and 1530 for the Pentateuch (and almost a century before King James’s edition), adapting the successions of phrases used in medieval prose ‘to make a versatile style, capable of rising to high moments, but pithy not churchy’, as Ian Robinson says. It is hard to believe this is five hundred years old.
In the beginning God created heaven and earth. The earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the deep, and the spirit of god moved upon the water. Then God said: let there be light and there was light. And God saw the light that it was good: and divided the light from the darkness, and called the light day, and the darkness night: and so of the evening and morning was made the first day.
Remember what I said earlier. English prose isn’t necessarily much shorter today than it used to be. This is so simple! So plain! So short! So old!
Look at this sentence. The earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the deep, and the spirit of god moved upon the water. Remember the example from the beginning, of the man and the boy and the girl. We can do the same thing here.
The earth was void and empty. Darkness was upon the deep. The spirit of god moved upon the water. The earth was void and empty; darkness was upon the deep; the spirit of god moved upon the water.
Nothing much changes in either way of punctuating. It is just as simple. Each clause is just as short. What matters is that Tyndale is syntactical: his sentences are logical, not long strings of clauses, but each ordered around clear discrete sections.
Then came Thomas Cranmer, who in the Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552 brought Latin-style logical syntax over to English. Here is the Gloria.
Glory be to God on high. And in earth peace, good will towards men. We praise thee, we bless thee, we worship thee, we glorify thee, we give thanks to thee for thy great glory, O Lord God Heavenly King, God the father almighty.
Alliterative, rhythmic, and plain. So simple. And again, so short! We would separate those comma-separated clauses with full stops or semicolons (grammar pedants would complain about spliced commas when they see stuff like this, which is to greatly to everyone’s loss), but they are simple and short however you punctuate them.
In the Collects from the same prayer book, Cranmer starts writing complex sentences.
Lord, we beseech thee, assoil [excuse] thy people from their offences; that through thy bountiful goodness we may be delivered from the bands of all those sins, which by our frailty we have committed: Grant this, &c.
He had to write complex sentences to be able to translate the Latin faithfully. Cranmer punctuates logically, not for breaths or periods, but for the sense of the whole. This is the emergence of the fully syntactic sentence.
His sentences are clauses structured around finite verbs (i.e., a conjugated verb in a tense, not an infinitive: ‘we beseech’, not ‘to beseech’). In the example above, ‘we beseech thee’ is the main clause and ‘Lord assoil thy people’ is part of the object (the object complement). The rest are subordinate clauses. Notice that this is right branching, the subordinate material coming after the main verb. It’s the same sort of structure we might still find in the New York Times today.
The essential point is that Cranmer, following Tyndale, has developed an English syntax. He almost never now writes a sentence without a finite verb. The subject-verb-object pattern I showed at the start of this essay is being formed. This matters because English people heard this language day in, day out, at Holy Communion, Matins, and Evensong. These were the sentences that shaped our culture.
Sentences of finite verbs
In the eighteenth century the rhythmic periodic style was married to the logical, syntactic style. Samuel Johnson and Joseph Addison, co-founder of The Spectator, use the balanced clauses of the periodic style and the logical structures of the syntactical style. Johnson famously complained in the 1770s about a book that was written in the late 1600s. Everything was badly written then, he says, and today any barrow boy could turn a better sentence.
Here is Addison combining the new methods into some very fine English prose.
In the mean time, when I consider how much I have seen, read, and heard, I begin to blame my own Taciturnity; and since I have neither Time nor Inclination to communicate the Fulness of my Heart in Speech, I am resolved to do it in Writing; and to Print my self out, if possible, before I Die.
Compare Addison to this sentence which I grabbed at random from Astral Codex Ten.
When people do list a specific example, it’s almost always a claim that, if you’re unhappy with any result of a system, the system must have been designed by evil people who were deliberately trying to hurt you, and so you should become really paranoid and hate everyone involved.
Or this, from a recent edition of The Villager.
Being able to go through your life without ever looking back at a you from a previous time and thinking ‘Ah, you poor unsuspecting overoptimistic idiot, you really have no fucking idea what is coming, do you?’ is not a privilege my particular personality type allows for, but I think there might have been a part of me that once assumed such moments would dry up in my 40s. Not so.
Or this from From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy.
I’ve been disappointed in him other times – perfection isn’t the point of being a person, of course, but we were taught that infallibility is the point of being a pope, and because he was so good on certain issues, there was always this misguided hope within me that he’d completely reform the church on matters of gender and sexuality. But he gave me hope, which is something I don’t have much of – or at least, a new confirmation: the confirmation, specifically, that I was born into a tradition that values human life, animal life, and the earth, despite so many obvious signs to the contrary.
So many long, complex sentences! We so often write more like Addison than the ‘short prose’ people fixate on. What is similar is the logical structure of each sentence, especially the finite verbs.
As for short sentences, here is Fordyce, from Sermon VII, in 1776.
Young minds ought to be encouraged. In every young mind there is something good. An agreeable appearance is certainly engaging. Truth will never deny it: courtesy will readily own it.
Here he is again in Sermon VIII.
The human mind was made for action. In virtuous action consists its highest enjoyment. It will not, it cannot continue long unemployed, especially during the sprightly season of youth.
Turn of phrase aside, these are short modern sentences, locked away in a dusty old book you have most likely heard of (do you remember where?) but never read. (I am not recommending that you do read it; entertaining though Fordyce can be, the time for moral improvement via books of sermons is surely past.)
So it was that we came to have the English sentence, capable of simplicity, complexity, balance, and above all, versatility. We can be short or long, simple or complex: what makes English readable is logical syntax.
The emergence of the plain style
Coupled with syntax was the refinement of the plain style, which became dominant between 1650–1750, the period in English history described by Matthew Arnold as ‘the passage…to prose and reason’.
The plain style means what it says. No fuss. No metaphor. No figurative language. Just simple, direct, factual prose. The opposite of the plain style is the rhetorical or ornamental style. We use the plain style everywhere, all day long. It is what you mostly find in newspapers and on the internet. The opposite, known as the ornate, rhetorical, or florid style, is just that. It is ornate because it is complex not simple; rhetorical because it uses the tropes and tricks of oratory; florid because it prefers flourishes of expression to simpleness of style.
Here are two descriptions of rain: one in the plain style, one in the ornate. (Hemingway, then Dickens).
It stormed all that day. The wind drove down the rain and everywhere there was standing water and mud. The plaster of broken houses was gray and wet.
It was a murky confusion—here and there blotted with a colour like the colour of the smoke from damp fuel—of flying clouds, tossed up into most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened. There had been a wind all day; and it was rising then, with an extraordinary great sound. In another hour it had much increased, and the sky was more overcast, and blew hard.
You need only glance at a novel by James Joyce or Vladimir Nabokov or Thomas Pynchon to see that the rhetorical style never left literary fiction, even though many literary fiction writers use straightforward simple language. Look at the opening of Ulysses.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:
—Introibo ad altare Dei.
Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:
—Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!
Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the awaking mountains.
Even Joyce’s shortest sentences require a lot of our attention because they are not plain. In an essay of 2003 defending the use of the florid style in modern English, David Bentley Hart quoted Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, a fine example of rhetorical writing.
The ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, and brooded over by a dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and the mood which then swayed it. For it seemed to me as if then first I stood at a distance, and aloof from the uproar of life; as if the tumult, the fever, and the strife, were suspended; a respite granted from the secret burthens of the heart; a sabbath of repose; a resting from human labours.
This tradition of writing goes back through writers like RL Stevenson, Thomas Browne, to the King James Bible, and so many of the great poets.
The plain style has also existed for a long time. The Tyndale passage above, from 1530, repeats the word ‘light’ five times. In most modern prose, that would often be subject to ‘elegant variation’ or ‘enrichment’ or some other abuse of style. And it would be much worse.
Tyndale is building on the thousand year tradition that came before him, such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but he created what Robinson calls ‘the natural style of the English Bible.’ We do not have only a Latinate, ornate Bible, but often a plain one.
Beginning with Francis Bacon, who urged scientists to write plainly so they could be understood, there was a determined effort in English to produce a prose free from tropes, similes, and so on, but which simply said what it said. How else could an organization like the Royal Society function?
Seventeenth century writers like John Wilkins and eighteenth century philosophers like Adam Smith extolled the virtues of plain prose. The most well-known version of this idea today is probably George Orwell’s statement that ‘good prose is like a window pane’. Writers like John Locke required a plain style for their idea. In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes forbids ‘obscure, confused, and ambiguous Expressions, also all metaphoricall Speeches tending to the stirring up of Passion.’
The plain style is predominant today, though we still use the high style in many places.
In his Presidential Address to the English Association in 1984, the former editor of the London Times, William Rees-Mogg, said that for every column you print in the rhetorical style you must print fifty in the plain style. He was quick to add that, as the editor of Bernard Levin for ten years, being anti the rhetorical style would have been ungrateful. Here is an example of Levin’s rhetorical style, from 1 April 1971.
There is another gap in my musical life, though this one, the biggest of all, I think of rather as a huge and daunting mountain, a musical Everest. Peering up at the summit I see dimly through the mist that surrounds it the outlines of Bach. The St. Matthew Passion, the B Minor Mass, the gigantic vista of the chorales — there they all are, up in the clouds, beckoning and threatening at the same time.
I have started out on that climb countless times, only to turn back in uncomprehending despair. One day I must take my pack on my back, and my beautiful carved Alpenstock (which I bought in the shadow of Neuschwanstein, maddest of all the mad castles built by mad Ludwig of Bavaria) in my hand, and go up that mountain to plant my flag at the top or die in the attempt.
Levin was perhaps the best English journalist of his generation, and this florid style – extended metaphors, lots of reliance on words like daunting, peering – makes a lively contrast to the ordinary prose of his day.
Rees-Mogg said the plain style was humble, clinical, direct, detailed, little ornamented, moderate, pragmatic, and truthful. The plain style has no Everest, no mist, no vista, no beckoning and threatening, no maddest of all mad castles.
The plain style is loved on the internet, especially by people involved in tech, progress, blogs, and rationalism of various forms. And no wonder. As Rees-Mogg said, it has traditionally been the prose of sceptical philosophers, ‘of those who wish to trim the fat off ideology’. It is the prose of economics. (According to Rees-Mogg, David Hume and Adam Smith wrote the best plain prose.) Paul Graham writes: ‘I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences. That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it.’
Talking or writing?
You might have read this essay and largely agreed with me but still been left with the feeling that something is different about modern prose as compared to the writing of the 1700s, not just the fact that we use less obscure vocabulary or the substituting full stops for colons and semicolons. Something else is still different. I think that something is that we increasingly write like we speak.
A huge amount of what we write and say doesn’t actually form syntactical sentences. Sports commentary, weather forecasts, a good deal of radio and podcasting, tax forms, programs, glossaries, menus, contents pages, dictionary definitions. All rely on more fragmentary language. You do not always find well-formed syntactical sentences in these places. Even a writer like Matthew Yglesias, who typically uses writerly syntactical sentences, will include things like this in his Substack: ‘Mamdani… I just don’t know.’ Pure speechified writing. Kyla Scanlon does it too: ‘Succinctly… everything feels like crypto now?’ Scanlon fans (of whom I am one) will know that her videos have the same tone as her Substack. Scott Alexander is good at using speech-like English:
No, seriously, it was awful. I deleted my blog of 1,557 posts. I wanted to protect my privacy, but I ended up with articles about me in New Yorker, Reason, and The Daily Beast.
Even a literary writer will do this. The novelist Brandon Taylor writes a Substack where he often sounds speechified, as in this example: ‘As to the charge of Substack’s un-programmatic writing. Be so serious. Be so for real, right now.’ It is not just the tone and phrasing, look at the punctuation too. This is not something that has only just started happening. We have been writing like we talk for a century or more.
In Modern Prose Style (1934, updated in 1963), Bonamy Dobrée contrasts a passage of Thomas Browne (seventeenth century) and William James (nineteenth century). You know each of them, immediately, as products of their time. The difference from us, he says, is in their rhythm. See these two extracts, first Browne, then James.
…embryon Truths, and Verities yet in their Chaos…
..old-fashioned absolute sense of the term…
Read them aloud. They have a strikingly similar rhythm. It is dactylic. DUM—dee—dee, DUM—dee—dee. Bold marks the stressed syllables.
Em-bry-on Truths-, and Ver-it-ies yet in their Cha-os
old-fash-ioned ab-sol-ute sense of the term.
Modern writing has much less emphasis on rhythm. Phrases are longer and more flexible. What Dobrée saw in 1934 was a return to speech-like writing. He has some funny examples of newspapers writing in a writerly style which sounds absurd. This is from the Times in 1934: ‘as soon as it was announced, on the morrow of Parliament’s rising’. And this from the Daily Worker: ‘No sound comes from out those walls.’ You would be mocked if you talked like that, he said. Newspapers still sometimes sound like this. But mostly we avoid writing in this obviously written manner. Modern prose, no doubt under the influence of the radio, telephone, telegraph, and later television, was becoming like talk, hence the still ubiquitous advice (beloved of the short-sentence people) to write like you speak.
You even find this in classic literature. Look at the opening of Bleak House.
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather.
Or this, from D.H. Lawrence.
Awful years—’16, ’17, ’18, ’19—the years when the damage was done. The years when the world lost its real manhood. Not for lack of courage to face death. Plenty of superb courage to face death. But no courage in any man to face his own isolated soul, and abide by its decision. Easier to sacrifice oneself. So much easier!
This is all good prose. And it would support the shortness thesis. But, there are not many actual syntactical sentences here. Those fragments from Dickens and Lawrence, all that podcast talk, that is what modern prose is often like.
Helen de Witt gave a perfect example of this point recently, when she mentioned that she had, as a graduate heading to Oxford, read Samuel Johnson, thinking that was how English people wrote. After arriving she was instead advised to read CS Lewis to improve her prose style. Johnson has a writerly style. Lewis always sounds like he is talking to you. No-one could think that Addison or Carlyle’s books (even his lectures) were just dictation, caught by someone overhearing them, but you might believe that about CS Lewis, whose work often reads like a transcript of a radio broadcast. The extract I gave from Bernard Levin earlier is another good instance: Levin always sounds like he is talking to you, albeit in his rhetorical style.
We are speechifying our prose just as earlier generations created a very literary plain style. To write like we speak means to write with fewer syntactic sentences and in more speech-like patterns.
When we are still syntactic, which is often, we are as plain and simple as Tyndale. Reading a publication like Works in Progress means reading a sort of English prose that was refined and perfected by Bible translators and philosophers and essayists. Reading the internet often feels like reading something in the plain style but which is not very much like writing.
If sentences are getting shorter now (and as I say, I suspect a lot of it is just punctuation differences) that is not what makes modern prose easy to read. Those achievements are part of a much longer history. Prose made its progress a long time ago. The miracle of modern English is not shortness or simplicity, per se, but that it allows us to do almost anything: syntax can swell to great length or be concise and taut; it has room for ornate vocabulary and simple language; it is a structure that allows us to build many forms of expression. It gives us Shakespeare and Locke, Milton and Darwin. It is the language of poets but also of economists and YouTube commentators.