3 ms·
It is not that modern writing is more clear or in any way better than the styles of the past, it is more often the case that the audience for a modern author is
by evgen 12y ago
It is not that modern writing is more clear or in any way better than the styles of the past, it is more often the case that the audience for a modern author is a barely educated simpleton who has a hard time keeping track of a sentence with more than one subordinate clause. The problem is not with Dickens...
- crusso 12y agoThe beauty of good writing is the ability of the author to state things simply without requiring the reader to meander through all the half-filled closets of the author's mind.
- vvvv 12y agoHorses for courses. I don't enjoy overly complex business-speak but I do sometimes like reading novels where you even have to refer to footnotes to fully understand the word plays and cultural/historical connotations. Certain writers would have spent days and weeks crafting a single sentence to perfection and I appreciate the effort.
- jerf 12y ago"Barely educated simpleton" is unnecessarily harsh. Historically speaking, living in an era with majority literacy is unusual (so as to dodge questions about the "true" level of modern literacy), as is living in an era with large numbers of people with the free time to read anything. It is true that Dickens could assume a somewhat higher level of IQ in his readers of the time than we can today in books targeted for the "average" reader, but I think most of us would consider that an unfortunate thing if we really thought about it, rather than a virtue of the age. If you want challenging books, there's no shortage of them today. You just need to know where to look.
- Swizec 12y agoAlso, distraction. It doesn't matter how smart your readers are, if they only read your books 5 minutes at a time while on the shitter, you have better written simply.