I agree that "vastly more people who have pursued educations and careers in literature and writing than any past point in history." I don't think that necessari

I agree that "vastly more people who have pursued educations and careers in literature and writing than any past point in history." I don't think that necessarily means we're producing better writers than the best writers of the pre-18th century Earth, largely because exemplary writers are formed--like a Terence Tao in math--at an early age. Anecdotally Faulkner never graduated from college; Shakespeare never went to college. Let's go back to the (overly) strong statement our parent post made: >I think that writing just like everything else has improved with the 20th and 21st century's obsession with design. As such, not all but the best modern writing is much more expressive, concise and communicative. Concision is more a modern trend than anything else and not an absolute good so we'll ignore it. Name me a 21st century writer more expressive and communicative than Shakespeare. Or assuming he's too "long-tail," someone more expressive than Faulkner. And I agree this is completely subjective, so I'd think the best course of action is seeing if there is any academic consensus on the subject. Just some quick googling, but here's an article [0] about a Stanford study showing that modern students are writing more than ever (mostly through text messages/social media). But one wonders whether text messages are (a) "prose" in the literary sense, (b) materially different enough on a mental level from just talking to someone to offer any additional benefit, (c) transferable in skills to writing a novel. The authors say that the students are good at "assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across," but their test subjects are a bunch of Stanford students who are great at jumping through hoops and conforming to expectations--as shown by the fact that they got into Stanford. Not to mention that they're not comparing the papers to a sample of pre-texting papers... Anyway, not like that article is definitive or anything.