How Does Today's Writing Differ from 19/20th Century Writing?

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Originally Posted by Charles Darnay

even this is a bit myopic - but you're in fair company there. It's part of romanticizing the past, but the truth is, if you read 19th century essays, you will find complaints that the English language is dying and people are becoming lazy in writing and speech.

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I wonder what those same authors would say about todays American English

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Originally Posted by islandclimber

You cannot compare a macrocosmic view of contemporary literature to a microcosmic view of 19th/early 20th century literature. Just as there is highbrow and lowbrow now, there was also highbrow and lowbrow then. A failure to take this into account reduces an opinion to irrelevancy.

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You make a great point there.

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Originally Posted by Eman Resu

According to the most recently published (June, 2011) I.E.L.T.S. (International English Language Testing System) findings "...in the last 50 years, the average working vocabulary of a 15 year old has decreased from 25,000 words to just 10,000 words," hence we might infer that both writer and audience have suffered at least minimally at the hands of the Common Denominator Effect, and that has been a lexiconic change (Aside: The Bard's estimated vocabulary is most often expressed as "c. 290,000 words;" Winston Churchill's as "400,000 words.") Given that two short centuries ago in America, collegial entry examinations required that the prospective student possess a mastery of Greek, Latin and English grammar, to be able to read three orations from Cicero's De Officiis and Virgil’s Æneid in the original Latin, and to evidence the ability to translate the first ten chapters of one of the four Gospels from Greek into Latin, the above remarks suggesting a decline in the "quality" of contemporary writing are probably readily justifiable.,

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Not merely justifiable, today's average college student is just plain stupid and inferior to a college student from 1875 and would probably crumble under the workload and demand of a real challenging education.

As an American, when I think about the style of America's Victorian era I think of high class American southerners. Many of them continue to embody that laid back high brow Victorian attitude and I think perhaps that was sort of where the style of that era came from.

Much like in the 1980s glam rock ruled the style and attitude of America and the 1990s grunge did the same. Everyone was using hairspray then suddenly everyone was wearing flannel. Those ideas came from one place. I think those same sort of stylistic trends came about the same way back in the 1800s and 1700s. Like, large pointy triangle hats in the 1700s. They started somewhere. Puffy shirts in the 1600s. They started somewhere.

Has anybody read The Art of Novel by Czech writer Milan Kundera?

I think it is justified when it indulges in the phenomenon of how slowly art of writing is disappearing/degrading!
Each page is filled with words of wisdom and great historical analysis as well as sensible future predictions

Must quote these lines from in there:
"NOVEL. The great prose form in which an author thoroughly explores, by means of experimental selves (characters), some great themes of existence.

LETTERS. They are getting smaller and smaller in books these days. I imagine the death of literature; bit by bit, without anyone noticing, the type shrinks until it becomes utterly invisible."

Has anybody read The Art of Novel by Czech writer Milan Kundera?

I think it is justified when it indulges in the phenomenon of how slowly art of writing is disappearing/degrading!
Each page is filled with words of wisdom and great historical analysis as well as sensible future predictions

Must quote these lines from in there:
"NOVEL. The great prose form in which an author thoroughly explores, by means of experimental selves (characters), some great themes of existence.

LETTERS. They are getting smaller and smaller in books these days. I imagine the death of literature; bit by bit, without anyone noticing, the type shrinks until it becomes utterly invisible."