Why is most modern prose so simple?

[Philosophaster]

In my reading of literature I have noticed a general trend toward the simplification of English prose over time. By "simplification" I mean that the syntax of sentences has become less complex, paragraphs have gotten shorter, and the vocabulary is generally less varied and tends to stick to more common words than earlier prose did. It seems like English prose was at its most complex in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (although I admit I haven't read a whole lot written before those years); then it became a little simpler in the nineteenth century; and then after World War I it really started tumbling down in terms of grammatical complexity. Why did this happen? Was it because new media like radio and television made the written word less central to communication and entertainment, decreasing the tolerance for complex language?

I realize that modern writing is in some ways more complex than older stuff. Many modern novelists experiment with abandoning traditional narrative forms and try out new ways of depicting the consciousness of characters. Often this experimentalism also results in the throwing out of old grammatical conventions as well, leading to unpunctuated streams of words, or paragraphs composed of sentence "fragments." But it still seems that, on a purely grammatical level, the complexity of prose has gone down -- on average.

Thoughts on this topic?

[Emil Miller]

In my reading of literature I have noticed a general trend toward the simplification of English prose over time. By "simplification" I mean that the syntax of sentences has become less complex, paragraphs have gotten shorter, and the vocabulary is generally less varied and tends to stick to more common words than earlier prose did. It seems like English prose was at its most complex in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (although I admit I haven't read a whole lot written before those years); then it became a little simpler in the nineteenth century; and then after World War I it really started tumbling down in terms of grammatical complexity. Why did this happen? Was it because new media like radio and television made the written word less central to communication and entertainment, decreasing the tolerance for complex language?

I realize that modern writing is in some ways more complex than older stuff. Many modern novelists experiment with abandoning traditional narrative forms and try out new ways of depicting the consciousness of characters. Often this experimentalism also results in the throwing out of old grammatical conventions as well, leading to unpunctuated streams of words, or paragraphs composed of sentence "fragments." But it still seems that, on a purely grammatical level, the complexity of prose has gone down -- on average.

Thoughts on this topic?

I would imagine that you are going to get some hefty posts on this thread but I will keep mine short and say that, although writing styles have changed throughout the centuries, WW1 was an obvious watershed in English prose writing as in much else. The determination of certain writers to throw out what they considered to be the unecessary baggage in the writing of novels, that was particularly noticeable in the 19th century, was echoed in music, painting and architecture which also sought to strip out 'superfluous' elements that had formerly been the accepted way of doing things. I don't think radio or television were central to the change, it was rather a case of a small number of 'enfants terribles' in the arts setting the trend for others to follow. Although it is true that certain facets of this behaviour were already noticeable at the turn of the century, the war was the catalyst that paved the way for a proliferation of such ideas.

[kelby_lake]

Probably because the style of classic books is to write in long sentences, because that was basically their TV, so everyone would delight in long passages.

Nowadays writers seem to write either for money or for ego-boosting. Also people's concentration has definitely waned.

[PabloQ]

In general, I think that much of today's novelists cater to the ever shortening attention spans of readers. If you take BB's point, it really make sense. Compare a Jackson Pollack with a Ruebens. Compare with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with a Coldplay song. The evolution of art seems to be more of a de-evolution into simpler, less complex forms across the board.

I put much of the blame on the arts becoming more of a business than an art. Artists aren't as interested in starving as they once were. Popular authors that have contracts with leading publishing houses have deadlines and are under pressure to produce the next "product." That doesn't give them the time to craft the piece. So they churn it out. On the other hand, much of the readership of that "product" are looking for something lighter than the complex lives they lead and tend toward the common.

But once again, these are generalized comments. There are still authors dedicated to crafting a well-written novel. They just aren't as much the rule, but the exception. They are harder to find, but worth the hunt once you find them.

[PeterL]

The answer depends on exactly what you mean by "modern". As a general matter, I agree with your observation about writing. Several events or trends have led to the simplification of most written English, but I believe that there were two things that share the greatest blame: the democratization of education and the simplification of ideas. As literacy became more common, the average level of literacy became lower. Four hundred years ago about 25% of the English speaking people were literate, but those 25% were the most intelligent people in the English speaking world. Today literacy is about 90%, which greatly dilutes the pool of potential writers. The simplification of ideas went hand-in-hand with democratization of education. Rather than going into all of the details of something, most writers gloss over the hard parts, so that they won't lose their readers. Consider that two hundred years ago a student had to be fluent in Latin and competent in Greek to be accepted in college; now they don't need nay of either; that went out in the late 1800's. I could go on, but it would be piling on more of the same. Recent writers aim at the lowest common denominator.

[Philosophaster]

Good point, PeterL. Writers in earlier generations were writing to a smaller audience, but that audience generally had a very high level of education, unlike the average person in today's more general readership. Also, I can imagine extended study of Greek and Latin would prepare a person to deal with very complex syntax. Learning highly inflected languages really forces you to think about how the different parts of sentences fit together.

[grotto]

Also, the cost of printing a novel by percentage was very prohibitive to a lot of publisher in the 19th century. A book had to merit the risk. With the ever decreasing cost of print, it became easier to take a risk and get a novel to the masses. Also, the written word was for centuries an elitist endeavor. To own books was a sign of wealth. In such, the wealthy declared what it was that was worth printing, another yet very real form of censorship.

There are still prose written where you need a dictionary at the ready to understand, along with novels written that require that you pay attention to detail, but, I’m also glad for the works of the obscure that wouldn’t of been put in print a 100 years ago due to cost or some form of censorship. While there certainly is a lot of mindless garbage out there, there are more gems to found also. Some times having a choice is a good thing and I’m glad for that.

[mortalterror]

I believe that the OP is not decrying the quality of modern prose writing so much as pointing out an observable trend. The style of writing which uses shorter sentences, fewer clauses, and simpler diction is known as Attic and can be demonstrated by the ancient Greek orator Lysias. A more contemporary exemplar of the Attic style would be a writer like Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, or Jack London. The attic style of writing stresses simplicity, as well as a natural, colloquial, informal language typical of conversation. This style stands in direct opposition to the asiatic style which is known for it's ornateness, rhetoric, formality, and artificiality. I suppose you would put writers such as Proust or Oscar Wilde on this side of the equation. Most writing falls between the two and is a compound of both.

I'm not exactly sure why there has been a move toward increased atticism in literary style. But I think it might have something to do with the dominant nature of realism in fiction over the last few centuries. A patently artificial style might undercut the naturalism of the action and characters in a work of realistic fiction.

[Philosophaster]

You have it right, mortalterror. I'm not saying that modern prose is badly written -- many of my favorite works are from the twentieth century -- just that most of it is grammatically and lexically simpler than older stuff.

[Uberzensch]

PeterL,

I think that's a great point!

I was ready to blame the lowered bar of society, but I think this is a far better explanation.

If one looks hard enough, there still exists complex prose. It's just typically drowned out by the mass-market crap.

This is analagous to film. There's some gems out there, but much more Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Fast and Furious 19.

[JBI]

Because Anglo-Saxon rooted words are more potent, whereas before latinate words were more elegant. There was a certain flamboyance in the 18th century, and with the rise of the letter, that flamboyance became a sort of formal writing convention used by people obsessed with sounding positively high class in their correspondence. Common speech, I would think, by the illiterate masses however, was probably simpler than Dan Brown.

Of course, Wordsworth insinuated a move forward, but again the sense of formal latinism was still prevalent in prose, and poetry, for all his steps he not only backed up and returned to formal language, but also didn't go that far into the Germanic as 20th century poets and writers. By the end however, people realized that the more monosyllabic, the more Germanic the diction in English, the stronger the line seems to be. It has nothing really to do with speech, but more to do with intellectual snobbery.

If any of you study Italian, for instance, you will notice many of the roots of words in Italian are similar to English, but you also will notice, that none of the words are commonplace. This is because the bulk of one's lexicon for every day, the top 1000 words at any rate, is Germanic, and if there is a Germanic word for something, that is most likely used over the Latinate synonym. This of course, got taken up by prose writers, and now we have prose closer to the language of speech.

Hope this helps.

[LitNetIsGreat]

I think people above have listed some good reasons as to why in general prose has become more compact over time, so I won’t go over that again, but I think the rule of the masses is a good argument for the watering down of prose.

In general terms I prefer older style Victorian prose and can sometimes be put off by modern styles, not just for the shortness of it, but also for its word choice and interestingly for its artificiality – in short I feel as if they “try” too hard. This may seem a strange angle for someone who in general terms likes older style prose but I will try and express what I mean. Please take into account that I am speaking very much in general terms here and don’t mean to condemn or praise an entire century with two short extracts.

So for an example of what I am getting at here is the opening to Wilde’s Dorian Gray, one of my favourite novels:


The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch he gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then their fantastic shadows of birds in the flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokio who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.

Yes so that is the first two sentences from Dorian Gray, long but I am immediately attracted to that and think, although it is not a prime example of outstanding prose, it is at the very least a good piece of writing and conveys the scent and décor of the studio and the people within in it perfectly. It is very rich and sweet, decadent in nature and actually something which most of the old school Victorians wouldn’t have approved of too much for its sensual nature.

When I handed that to a work colleague once and asked them what they thought of the first page they replied that it was “heavy going” or something of that kind. They didn’t say “wow, that is beautiful can I borrow it?” but that it seemed “heavy going” in other words different from what they were used to reading entirely. In fact I have lent out a copy of Dorian about five times and it has only been read to the end once?

Now here is the opening section to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road which someone lent me at my request, it is a book that I have still not gotten around to reading, though it is a highly respected novel from what I gather:


When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light palying over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast.

Now as I say I’m not trying to read too much into this comparison, but I am just not taken with this style of prose too much at all, it seems somewhat forced in nature. I just don’t really believe in the similes too much, two used within this short sequence. I don’t like the immediate forced action of the novel, it doesn’t work for me as part of an opening page. It feels like he understands that he must capture his audience quickly (which modern novelists must I suppose) but I don’t like it nonetheless. I will read it eventually and I must in order to give it a fair chance (no time at the moment) but the prose seems very textbook here, very indicative of a modern novel and it immediately makes me pull a face and sends me reeling for something else, harsh critic that I am.

I think it is just down to personal preference maybe, but I prefer the Wilde style writing to the one just quoted. Of course it is writing suicide to try and write in the Victorian style nowadays for such would be an example of poor style. Imagine handing in an essay for example with about 15 punctuation marks in one sentence - you would be flogged!

I think the balance is to not to try and force anything or mimic something else, but to try to remain true to art and characterisation. To try and be original at least to yourself.

[stlukesguild]

In general, I think that much of today's novelists cater to the ever shortening attention spans of readers.

As PeterL points out, the percentage of those who qualify as "literate" today is far greater than it was in past centuries which has had the result of diluting the audience. Those who are passionate about books and reading are no less so now than they ever were and demand no less of their reading materials. Personally, reading Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Jose Saramago, Cees Nooteboom, Gunter Grass, or any number of other contemporary writers, I don't see the inherent simplicity or lack of complexities... in content or in language. Going back to Proust and Joyce I can't say I can think of many writers from any time or place who could match them for richness of prose language.

Compare a Jackson Pollack with a Ruebens. Compare with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with a Coldplay song. The evolution of art seems to be more of a de-evolution into simpler, less complex forms across the board.

How accurate are these examples? How related are the efforts of Pollack and Rubens? One might do far better to compare the abstract, gestural, spontaneous art of Pollack with that of certain Japanese calligraphic artists. On the other hand, Max Beckmann, Picasso, Matisse, Salvador Dali, Bonnard, etc... at their finest can certainly hold their own to the complexity of Rubens... although it must also be admitted that Rubens is one of the absolute towering figures in the history of painting... one that perhaps only Picasso may be said to have equaled in the last century. On the other hand... the comparison of Beethoven and Coldplay is disingenuous at best. You are comparing a master of music as a fine art with popular music. Beethoven's era had its own popular music... minstrels and performers who frequented the bars and taverns... songs of drinking and sex that were certainly far more known among the working classes than Ludwig's Grosse Fugue. Again Beethoven is an almost insurmountable example. Along with Mozart and Bach he is commonly counted as one of the three central figures of Western classical music. One would certainly be hard pressed to suggest any contemporary composer to rival him... but there are undoubtedly any number of composers of real genius working today... or within the recent past: Arvo Part, Henryck Gorecki, Tan Dun, Osvaldo Golijov, Richard Strauss, Carl Orff, Gustav Holst, Benjamin Britten, Herbert Howells, Aaron Copland, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky, Shostakovitch, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, ... and if you consider the finest jazz composers whom many (myself included) would rank among the finest music contributions of the past century (and not unworthy of sharing space with Ravel, Satie, Debussy... or even Beethoven) one might add Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Theloious Monk, Miles Davis, etc...

I put much of the blame on the arts becoming more of a business than an art. Artists aren't as interested in starving as they once were.

Nonsense. Art has always been a business... a profession. The notion that one must suffer to create... one must be a "starving artist"... is just a sad romanticized notion of what art is. Rubens was a professional who employed numerous assistants and churned out paintings to meet the demand. He was extremely well compensated for his labors. Most old masters were highly regarded craftsmen meeting the demand for what is essentially a luxury product.

Popular authors that have contracts with leading publishing houses have deadlines and are under pressure to produce the next "product." That doesn't give them the time to craft the piece.

And what of Dickens... or even Shakespeare? Having an endless amount of time to labor upon a work of art is a luxury... but not necessarily a necessity. Deadlines and can be a great source of motivation, and craft can be quite labor intensive... but time constraints need not mean a loss of craft.

[FalseReality]

Because art in the twentieth century has continued on a trend of simplification, which falls under the general term of abstraction.
Some call it minimalism. Much of modern art is about reducing reality until the point right before it changes into something else. How many details can you remove before an object becomes unrecognizable.

Much of this has already been said, but here are more examples.

In art: Matisse, Miro, Modrian
Are painters catering to a shorter attention span?

In music: Terry Riley, John Cage, Laurie Anderson
Are musicians catering to a shorter attention span?

Would you expect different from literature?
I doubt those who write books would say they are dumbing down their writing. Samuel Becket or Hemingway, geniuses in their own right, did not compromise their work to make it more palpable for sale or consumption. Nothing happens in Beckett's Waiting for Godot. In fact it has been described as "a play where nothing happens twice" (b/c of its two acts). Yet, to find the meaning of the play is extremely difficult.

Complexity in language is not indicative of the intelligence of the reading population. And if you need a quote or something to tell you how difficult simplicity is, just look it up, there are plenty out there.

[mayneverhave]

You have it right, mortalterror. I'm not saying that modern prose is badly written -- many of my favorite works are from the twentieth century -- just that most of it is grammatically and lexically simpler than older stuff.

The problem with this is that you are oversimplifying 20th century literature. Although Hemingway and Steinbeck (and others like Salinger) wrote in a simpler, minamilistic style, the Inter-war, Post WWI period also featured writers like Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, and Woolf, who are considered (for fairly obvious reasons) some of the most difficult and complex writers to have ever lived.

Therefore, I wouldn't claim that this trend towards the simplistic was a product of WWI - because the style of the early 20th century (modernism) was often not "Attic". I cannot say regarding contemporary fiction, but from what I've read, I would agree with you that it is rather simplistic.

[nickoil]

The simplification of sytactic devices is supplimented in the content of the work.The old style of English, mainly characterlized as witty,ironic,complex and refined work, must die out because the aesthetic standard of prose changed.People like to read prose in a understandable way.People would not like to waste a whole afternoon lieing in couch lazily in reading 4 or 5 pages.The old style of life changed,so that the literature must chang.People in the seventeenth century enjoy the cold humor when they employ themselves in those well-prepared words and complex sytactic structure,while people today enjoy everyday language,familiar style.

[prendrelemick]

When books were special (expensive) they were written in a special language, that had little to do with common speech. The authors and readers were from the same educated classes, they understood one another. The conventions of what good writing should be was set within their circles.

This will no longer do. The educated classes now include everybody. The common man with his common speech is now the audience that sets the conventions. They want to see their life reflected on the page.

I don't think this is "dumbing down". Simple direct prose is as hard to do well as the rococo style of the past.

I should just say that, although now thought "wordy" great authors like Jane Austin, rarely wasted a syllable.

[promtbr]

In my reading of literature I have noticed a general trend toward the simplification of English prose over time. By "simplification" I mean that the syntax of sentences has become less complex, paragraphs have gotten shorter, and the vocabulary is generally less varied and tends to stick to more common words than earlier prose did. It seems like English prose was at its most complex in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (although I admit I haven't read a whole lot written before those years); then it became a little simpler in the nineteenth century; and then after World War I it really started tumbling down in terms of grammatical complexity. Why did this happen? Was it because new media like radio and television made the written word less central to communication and entertainment, decreasing the tolerance for complex language?


Great topic. And IMHO, I agree with your premise, though the term "modern" to refer to literature has baggage, as for some it also loosely defines a type of literature.....

Also, as other posters have pointed out, pre Electronic Age culture relied more on personal interaction (conversation) as a way of passing time and "entertainment". After the advent of Electronic Media as primary entertainment, the art of conversation, personal conversation skills took a big dive (again just MO).We had the patience to listen and the patience to express our selves, to communicate and took pleasure in it. I am not implying we no longer enjoy communicating, it is in a different register, as in everything is ABREVIATED, therefore we rely on more assumptions in our method, the listener/recipeint is expected to fill in the gaps...assuming the recipent shares the same code type. That's my pre-chomsky/derrida/barthes educated take. Now the rest of this thread will be filled with these textual-linguistic analytical posts from current academia and the rest of us can move on to other interesting threads...;)



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[wateredwhisky]

There is one inherent problem with criticizing not only modern prose, but also with criticizing art of the 20th century in general. More often than not it seems to become an exercise in cultural relativism. The 20th century was a monolith of literary production on a scale that none of us can really quite properly fathom. There certainly was a trend (which we still see the lasting tendrils of to this day) for short, terse sentences in the form of Hemingway and other such contemporaries. I definitely agree with the points about the heavy integration of germanic-based vocabulary into our language, but that only seems to be a small piece of a larger point that is basically about dialectic evolution as well as a boom in literacy.

When looking from the 20th and 21st centuries, especially when you are studying literature in some sort of degree program, we have this preconception that in some way the Romantic and Victorian prose was, for some reason, more developed and complex than modern prose. It is important to remember that large portions of the prose from the 19th century were written in dialectic idioms of the upper class. I am personally of the opinion that a large part of why we view this style of writing as more 'intellectual' is because we have been ideologically oriented towards viewing Victorian English in this light. It shares a lot of similarities with modern-day arguments about the linguistic status of American cultural dialects such as what can be for lack of a better term called "Black English." Although many people argue that these evolutions are a debasement of proper English, many linguists find that the dialect is in some ways more emotive and expressive than proper modern English. Nonetheless, let's return to the Victorian style. This form could actually be viewed as a limiting factor. Part of the modernist rejection of Victorian and Romantic traditions was based around these limits. The comedy of manners was a such a subject of parody in the early modernists (i.e. playwrights like Shaw) because it exemplified the limitations of Victorian dialects. If we understand subject and style to be entangled we realized that it's very hard to write about modernist issues while sounding like a Victorian gentleman.

In whole, it would seem as if the evolution came merely out of necessity. A huge cultural shift required a new form of expression that we can see throughout the modernist and post-modernist periods. However, the varying complexity of sentences between the 19th century and 20th century looks more like an opening up of options for writers. It's not that complex prose was rejected, but that it was just reduced to a place among other styles. T.S. Eliot is famous for stating that an author needs to simultaneously honor tradition (such as previous modes of writing) and reject them. As someone mentioned, authors like Pynchon are incredibly good writers that stretch our own dialects to their ends. But I have a hard time imagining some of the more grotesque scenes of Gravity's Rainbow ever being written if Pynchon were unable to work with the dialectic shifts that we have provided him with.

[curlyqlink]

I'm not sure about WWI being the dividing line, because of works like T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which are anything but simple and straightforward.

I'm also not sure about "the masses" argument, because I suspect that reading was likely a more common pastime in the late 19th century than it is today. If we exclude "reading" the computer screen, that is!

Language has gotten simpler, but I'm not sure there is any one explanation. And it's not just literature-- political speeches, for example, are much more folksy than the oratorical set-pieces they used to be, and that's largely a post-WW2 trend.

Plain writing has its advantages. So too do long, compound sentences. I just think it's a pity that for lots of contemporary readers, the latter have become virtually incomprehensible, a source of frustration, and tend to get dismissed as fancy-pants affectation. I mean, some thoughts do require more than just a noun, a verb, and an adjective.

[FalseReality]

The simplification of sytactic devices is supplimented in the content of the work.The old style of English, mainly characterlized as witty,ironic,complex and refined work, must die out because the aesthetic standard of prose changed.People like to read prose in a understandable way.People would not like to waste a whole afternoon lieing in couch lazily in reading 4 or 5 pages.The old style of life changed,so that the literature must chang.People in the seventeenth century enjoy the cold humor when they employ themselves in those well-prepared words and complex sytactic structure,while people today enjoy everyday language,familiar style.

Then why are those books still around? According to you, nobody wants to read them anymore; yet, walk into any bookstore and the shelves are lined with classics. According to you, books that nobody wants to read are still in print, a century or more later. You're argument is flawed.

[prendrelemick]

Our lending library has 2 shelves of classics, and a whole room full of popular fiction.

[Mr Endon]

Good points are being made.

Complex grammar has no place in modern society. As simple as that. There's almost excessive information, and if you're not skilled at skimming you won't get anything done in this lifetime.

A great Portuguese poet wrote: 'Times change, wills change'. And literature has always to be contemporary, fresh and relevant, since it's bound by language, that ever-changing organism. If you write long, extremely intricate sentences with archaic words, your text will instantly be labelled a parody, because as a genuine attempt at expression that form no longer holds currency. Not that this is good or bad - it's just the way it is. Literature has to keep up with the times, and not the other way around.

[FalseReality]

Our lending library has 2 shelves of classics, and a whole room full of popular fiction.

That's surprising. I've definitely read more classics than popular fiction, and it seems like everyone I have met has too. Maybe you're different, maybe I am, who knows

[PeterL]

Sentence structure reflects the depth and complexity of thinking. Simple sentences are for simple thoughts; compound sentences are for compound thoughts; complex sentences are for complex thoughts; and compound-complex sentences are for compound complex thoughts. The simplification of sentence structure that has been seen in writing in the last hundred, or so, years reflects a simplification of thinking that has occurred during that same period. The reasons for that simplification have been multiple and rather complex, involving social, commercial, and educational changes that happened in that period and before it.

The evolution of writing styles and thinking has been shown more clearly in individual works than in the mass of writing. Some authors use, or have used, sentence structure to show their characters. For example, Hemingway usually had characters use short, simple sentences in dialogue. As a result, he is generally reputed to have had a terse style, but, when one looks at passages of direct narrative, it is clear that he used longer and more varied sentences structures. Rather than Hemingway having a terse writing style, he was creating characters of that sort. A different example is H. P. Lovecraft, who also used language and sentence to set the tone of his writing and to show characters. Lovecraft frequently had characters, especially when he wrote in the first person, think and speak in long complicated sentences. Just as often, his characters were people with complicated ideas.


There is a t least one book that goes into writing style as a reflection of thinking, Styles and Structures by Charles Kay Smith.

[blazeofglory]

The reason is today people want things in simple terms, and prehistoric writings are not admirable.

But the problem is today writers do not read the way they used to dedicatedly earlier.

[miyako73]

let's accept it--book publishing is now a big business unlike before when it was pure literary expression. Authors nowadays are more concerned with mass readability than exceptional creativity. What do you expect? Writing now is no longer exclusive for the intellectuals and geniuses. Addicts, prostitutes, and criminals now write in plain English. Some readers read not out of intellectual pleasure but of voyeuristic one.

[Madame X]

Off with their heads! :smash:

[Eryk]

Technology played a role.


Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. "Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom," the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his "‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper."

"You are right," Nietzsche replied, "our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts." Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose "changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style."

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

[stlukesguild]

Because art in the twentieth century has continued on a trend of simplification, which falls under the general term of abstraction.
Some call it minimalism. Much of modern art is about reducing reality until the point right before it changes into something else. How many details can you remove before an object becomes unrecognizable.

A gross simplification which ignores the fact that Modern Art is no monolithic entity. It is made up of the work of any number of artists with very different views and intentions.

Much of this has already been said, but here are more examples.

In art: Matisse, Miro, Modrian
Are painters catering to a shorter attention span?

In what way? Are we to assume that a Matisse painting in which the artist strove to capture the "essence" as opposed to the accumulation of details or an abstraction by Miro are less demanding upon the viewer? Might one not take an opposing view and suggest that older paintings with their clear detail and illusionism make things far easier for the viewer... spell things out? Of course I would never make such a suggestion. Art changes as artists struggle to confront the realities of their time. Yes... there were Modern artists who were driven by a need to strip things down to the essentials. But there are those who are complex as any artists in any time. Much of the imagined "simplicity" of Modern painting is nothing more than the artist's rejection of illusionism as the lingua franca of art. This owes much to the development of photography and perhaps more to a greater understanding and respect for the art of other cultures (even those of pre-Renaissance Europe) in which photographic realism or illusionism was not the sole standard measure of merit.

In music: Terry Riley, John Cage, Laurie Anderson
Are musicians catering to a shorter attention span?

Hmmm... Philip Glass' operas can run on for nearly as long as Wagner's. Shostakovitch' Preludes and Fugues match up in scale against Bach's epic Well Tempered Clavier. Tan Dun's Water Passion After St. Matthew is nearly as epic as Bach's St. Matthew Passion. Or perhaps we are to imagine such music is simpler... less demanding? Osvaldo Golijov employs influences from Spanish music, klezmer, Arabic and Hebrew chants, South American tangos, etc... Karl Orff's Carmina Burana was based on a collection of medieval German poetry. I can't quite accept any all-encompassing statements about Modern art... music... literature because they all seem to be simplifications or generalities which have little to do with the exceptional exceptions... and these exceptions are really what Modern art will become known by.

[billl]

Re: the influence of technology on thought and prose...

Here's something I typed up. It'd be better if I had taken more time, addressed counter-arguments, and included a lot more examples, caveats, etc. Anyhow.

I sometimes wonder if things like twitter and online social networks are sort of "training" people to produce "communication" that can be shared and analyzed very easily via computer networks. Our communication of our thoughts (and thus our experience of other people's thoughts, and the resulting effect on the evolution of our habits of thought) is under pressure to become more bite-sized, instantaneous, and communal.

I think this is more efficient for large-scale functioning. It's easy for a large number of people to take in a short burst of info, and maybe pass it on. Also, it's easier for a program to pick out important words/themes/memes when the info is small and simple. However, as things become more networked and standardized, the value of any individual communication begins to reside more in its portability and its universality. Rather than pondering an event, juggling words around, thinking through scenarios, producing original analogies, and honing presentation, people are getting more in the habit of pasting in a link to something someone else has done, maybe typing something they come up with after 10 seconds (or less) of reflection, and skipping over anything as time-intensive as reading this particular epic post. (Forgive me there for recycling that common meme/joke found in internet forums everywhere, expressing a bit of shame about how long this is.)

What is it? The 'coolness' of new technology? The inherent ease of online communication? The marketing and coverage of the latest trends in internet usage? ...Something is trying to push us in the direction of becoming servants to the network. When we do status updates, pass around videos, rate websites, or get entangled in info and advertising, we begin to lack depth, we're operating on technology's terms. We become just nodes, moving info around, maybe making instantaneous judgments sometimes, becoming less important as individuals as the network itself becomes more important to us. Again, what is steering this thing?

Anyhow, there are counter-examples, of course. Lots of great discussion in these forums here... Ten or twenty years ago, I'd have been a lucky person to have had access to this kind of discussion every night. And people are putting videos out there, and there actually is a lot of original stuff going on. And I'm also ignoring how facebook can bring old friends together again, and facilitate useful types of communication and planning. But I think, on the whole, the technology itself is kind of warping (many of) us away from depth, nuance and individuality. I think it's important to think about this, and that children (and even adults) should probably get educated about it. It's kind of a mental health issue.

Well, if you had the patience to read all of that, you're probably fine--I'm more worried about some of the others out there.

[JBI]

Honestly, all good art, is ultimately difficult, and infinitely complex, whether it be a minimalist composition by John Adams, a simple, almost childlike lyric by Housman, or a painting by Rubens, or In Search of Lost Time. All of them are infinitely complex. Even Hemingway bends toward the complex when he is best - a simple story, with very little in terms of content or narration, such as Hills Like White Elephants is far more complex than the longest, most drawn out 19th century French Family Saga that nobody remembers anymore (unless you are one of my professors, who specialist in mediocre 19th century French content, and scanned virtually every periodical of the time for any hint or mention of Emile Zola). Quite simply though, the better it is, the more complex it is. The actual difficulty, however, isn't tied to the complexity. Some poets/writers work better in complex frames, such as T.S. Eliot, or Wallace Stevens (the latter of which, by the end of his career, wrote poems that seem as if half the poem is missing, and really cause a strain to understand what is going on), or Wordsworth and John Clare. Keep in mind really, the same movement that produced Hemingway produced James Joyce - complexity is relative to the artist. In truth, modernist experimentation in prose during the modernist period pretty much took the novel beyond its limited role as secondary, mostly "women's" literature, and brought it to a form more complex and freer. In truth, I would think modernist prose, even the 'minimalist' form of Hemingway (though his style changes somewhat between his work, and isn't all 'minimalist') is far more complex than the prose of someone like Alexandre Dumas. People tend not to see the invisible work that goes on behind the words to form the narrative - the subtleties, and in most cases, the vast amount of work, put into getting things to work together perfectly, but really, all good art, it would seem has a sort of complexity, even if it is simple.


Keep in mind, if something seems simple, it can be assumed it was done for a reason, and the simple nature of the work is part of a grander scheme. The same goes with overtly complex things - the complexity is there for a reason, if the work is good. Something like Finnegans Wake may seem ridiculous, but its wacko language was done for a reason. Whether the effect was good or not is debatable, but the text requires all its attributes to function - without the language, Joyce wouldn't have written the book, or Hemingway his short story.

[stlukesguild]

Honestly, all good art, is ultimately difficult, and infinitely complex, whether it be a minimalist composition by John Adams, a simple, almost childlike lyric by Housman, or a painting by Rubens, or In Search of Lost Time. All of them are infinitely complex.

Certainly this is true... to an extent. The apparent simplicity of the opening movement of Beetoven's Moonlight Sonata or Erik Satie's Gymnopédies or William Blake's The Tyger or one of Monet's paintings should not be confused with simple-mindedness. Rather than simplicity we might use the term accessibility. Some works are more immediately accessible... some are quite daunting from the outset. The initial simplicity or accessibility is no guarantee of artistic merit one way or the other. Nor should one assume that a work that is initially quite accessible does not contain multiple layers of "meaning"... multitudes of complexities. Blake's Tyger, for example, reads initially almost like a child's poem... but the layers of meaning are quite complex. Monet's Haystacks and Mozart's Magic Flute may come across as far more accessible than Pollack's Autumn Rhythm and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde... but that should not be misconstrued as proof that the former lack depth and complexity or that the latter cannot be appreciated for passages of sheer visual/aural splendor. Surprisingly, in both instances a debt is owed to the earlier work. Pollack's field paintings are deeply indebted to the innovations of Monet and Wagner's grand musical dramas are deeply indebted to Mozart's singspiele.

[Bark]

In my reading of literature I have noticed a general trend toward the simplification of English prose over time. By "simplification" I mean that the syntax of sentences has become less complex, paragraphs have gotten shorter, and the vocabulary is generally less varied and tends to stick to more common words than earlier prose did. It seems like English prose was at its most complex in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (although I admit I haven't read a whole lot written before those years); then it became a little simpler in the nineteenth century; and then after World War I it really started tumbling down in terms of grammatical complexity. Why did this happen? Was it because new media like radio and television made the written word less central to communication and entertainment, decreasing the tolerance for complex language?

I realize that modern writing is in some ways more complex than older stuff. Many modern novelists experiment with abandoning traditional narrative forms and try out new ways of depicting the consciousness of characters. Often this experimentalism also results in the throwing out of old grammatical conventions as well, leading to unpunctuated streams of words, or paragraphs composed of sentence "fragments." But it still seems that, on a purely grammatical level, the complexity of prose has gone down -- on average.

Thoughts on this topic?
Ever read 1984? Syntax

Corporations reduce quality. Stephen King got a lit award that is beyond his fields ability to win, but he sells alot.

[spookymulder93]

I can appreciate a more complicated style of writing but I must say that I like modern prose more. It gets to the point a lot quicker than the classics.

I mean if you ask me for directions would rather me tell you to: Make a left on Washington, go 4 blocks east, then when you get to canal make another left, then go 4 blocks west, then make a right and go 7 blocks east again and make another right.

Or would you rather me just tell you that the place is across the street?

[Evaril]

When looking from the 20th and 21st centuries, especially when you are studying literature in some sort of degree program, we have this preconception that in some way the Romantic and Victorian prose was, for some reason, more developed and complex than modern prose. It is important to remember that large portions of the prose from the 19th century were written in dialectic idioms of the upper class. I am personally of the opinion that a large part of why we view this style of writing as more 'intellectual' is because we have been ideologically oriented towards viewing Victorian English in this light.

I'm no literature student and I cannot argue back with carefully-researched points such as yours, but my gut reaction is to disagree. When you read Victorian literature, look what leaps and turns the prose takes your mind through. Then read the brusque prose of today; true, you may draw and make your own leaps and turns from them, but so too can anyone from any kind of writing.

I am not from an English background and was not trained in English literature. When I picked up my first Victorian novel (David Copperfield), I was not predisposed to think it more intelligent than the modern novels I used to read. But my reaction was clear.

[Mr.lucifer]

Because prose used to be like this(I'm just kidding:


The nightfall, deeply saturated with every fibre of its being in the shadows of dark gloom and ocular turblence, encompassed wholly and thoroughly the dusty, unattended, dirty, untouched apartment building of one youthful, handsome yet very homely aspiring author of many tomes Report Siht, as he descended with a blindingly powerful glowing aura of casualty and sensual smoothness onto the slowly revolving Mid-Century Modern armchair that was currently situated betwixt and between his beige-coloured, antiquated digital binary computation machine and analysis device. The writer being spoken of gently placed beside his body the worn thesaurus (a thesaurus, of course, being a large tome containing lists of synonyms and antonyms), slowly yellowing and fading with the slow, constant passage of time, he had been delving into, he lowered his slender, pale fingers onto the black keyboard, his creaseless, silky hands striking the small intractable keys in quick succession while scrutinizing his search for a four-syllable phrase that is, to him worthy enough in all its purple glory to be written into his new masterpiece of literature to a veteran musician in search for the perfect melody to play to the masses, as they are entranced by the narcotic tune. But as he continued, at a tempo that only the smallest of snails could possibly envy, to turn through page after page after page of his wide, thick-as-a-doorstopper tome of words that he usually refers to as a thesaurus, he, over the course of hundreds of pages, begins to conceptualize that what was previously his treasure chest of multisyllabic vocabulary is now wholly exhausted, having used in some way each and every one of the words in some form or another. An "avarice" here, a "defenestrate" there, occasionally an "egregious" hiding somewhere within his vast, vast body of purple literature. He swiftly and instantly put down his once sacred book, and slowly, with a profoundly resigned look on his pale face, sighed in the general direction of his desktop-based computer machine, which, as you know, he is presently attempting to write his most ultraviolet magnum-opus.

"Oh, my blimey Lord, or Buddha, or Jesus, or Brahma, or Shiva, or Vishnu, or Satan, or the Great Horned God, or the Wiccan Goddess, or Apollo, or Jupiter, or Zeus (Even though you and Jupiter are one and the same), or Juno, or The Other Juno, or The Bad Wolf," he mused, saturating the air with his entire wistfulness, while his unceasingly flickering cathode-ray tube of a monitor began rapidly displaying the laggard starting of his currently ambiguous "world-wide collection of computer networks connected by phones, fibre optics and cable lines" surfing program in the immediate preparation for transferring his extremely long-winded masterpiece he calls his work of art to a favoured collection of digital pictures and Unicode, Comic Sans MS-based text of his, an exceedingly vast, all consuming collaboratively maintained repository of all knowledge dedicated solely to the pursuit of identifying and cataloguing any plot devices, clichés and other oft-repeated themes in a multitude of different works of fiction. "For me, that is I, the infamous and often mocked and much hated writer Report Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenberg Siht, it is indeed very, very troublesome for me, Report Siht, head of the Department Of Redundancy Department for me to find overtly flowery, unnecessary figures of larynx vibration and vocalization considered by the vast majority of the population of this planet, Earth (or Sol 3) in the date of June 10 in the year 2009 A.D to be vastly unsuitable by my fellow troping comrades for such a strictly utilitarian device as a encyclopaedia of tropes and clichés in various works of fiction on a personal, digital desktop computer that was invented around six decades (or sixty years) before this particular Filler-filed sentence escaped from my full, blood-red lips. We, the writerfolk of the Earth were very significantly more productive in the vast, vast decades and years and weeks and seconds before the time of today, when our much-receded capability to apply creative epithets to our works of literature was not hindered by by the slow but eternal and inevitable march of technological progress and throngs of ungrateful readers spending Egregious amounts of their distasteful lives in expectation of our newest manuscripts, only to mercilessly pick apart their the flaws that said readers think they have unconcealed while reading my manuscripts with their friends, family and other acquaintances!"

With his current contemplation of purple, prose and everything eventually grinding to a slow and restful halt, young Report's poor, addled assemblage of neurons and grey matter inside his cranium was little more than a Brobdingnagian, reverb-filled empty echo chamber, almost but not quite similar to an empty theatre, where no possible thoughts could ever be retrieved and brought into the light no matter how hard he attempted to do just that. For you see with your very sapphire sightorbs, my dear, determined-to-get-to-the-end-of-this readers, what was once his normally infinitely vast supply of useful flowery nouns, verbs, prepositions and adjectives in the English language had dead run dry, much to his slowly seething and coming to the surface chagrin, a chagrin that caused him to curse the heavens and all life that lived under it. Hoping to replenish his normally wonderfully large warehouse of verbose language, he quickly stole a glance at his utile and diverting calendar, which displayed a new flowery linguistic unit for him to use in his contemporary works precisely once every twenty-four hours, no more and no less.. Egregiously, he had forgotten to turn the folio of his Word-A-Day Calendar and bring in the new one thousand, four hundred and forty minutes.

Exactly eleven thousand, eight hundred and seventy seven kilometres away from the spot Mr. Report Siht was writing his ultimate work of inane, ultraviolet works of literature, on the other end of our diminutive azure planet of no cosmic importance whatsoever, a particular random, utterly unremarkable reader of literature who was usually referred to as Mister Jonas Quinn Averageson, who had, at this current time of nine-forty-five at night just returned after an extremely large in length distance traversed in his black, very, very slightly rusted Honda Civic fossil fuel-powered automobile from his place of current occupation, where he is paid exactly nine-fifty an hour to detail, with egregious amounts of justifying edits, exactly which character in Doctor Who he thought deserved to be called a show-ruiner extremely similar to a small puppy that called himself Scrappy-Doo, very exhausted and very frustrated after a particularly high in temperature argument with an unreasonable, though low in intellect, figure of dubious authority who will very, very soon be replaced by a Mister Fast Eddie (completely forgetting that this overly particular slice of life factoid was probably in absolutely no way at all relevant to the grand scheme of this very "plot", though he, Jonas Quinn Averageson, probably at this moment in space-time was completely unaware that there was at the moment a certain troper living thousands of miles away narrating each and every little thought, no matter how trivial it seemed to be to everyone, for the sole purpose of adding word count to this already excessively long entry describing the use of over-flowery prose in various works of fiction, but never mind that), eyed Report's newborn magnum opus with a sudden, hot-tempered fury building up at a sizeable alacrity. "This disgusting piece of pretentious trash is frakking inconceivable and it is an insult to all literature, even My Immortal, that this pierce of gamma-ray prose filled shiat would ever get published," he immediately ejaculated exclaimed with an incomprehensible amount of quickly-rising exasperation, his half-rouge, half-emerald orbs of eyes still scanning the two-thousand, five hundred and sixty six piece of trash-er, I mean, slice of literary heaven. "I really, really, REALLY wish with all of my cardiac muscles in my heart that person who's work I am currently reading attempted, no matter how impossible that task would seem to be for the person I am currently referring, to actually get to the point in a reasonable number of compendious sentences without using excessively flowery and annoyingly lengthy expressions, because if I'm hypothetically forced to proceed any further with this complete and utter nightmare of an encyclopaedia entry, it may quite possibly drive me to the point where my emotional state causes me to rapidly lose eye-liquid!"

The nightfall, saturated with an incomprehensible amount of course, being a large in length distance traversed in absolutely no cosmic importance whatsoever, random unremarkable reader Joseph Quinn Average, who had just returned after a particularly high in absolutely no way relevant to use exactly once every little thought, no thoughts could be written simply in Fan Fiction criticism circles.

The writer being a large tome containing lists of casualty and antonyms, slowly revolving armchair that it can make it eloquent by the slow constant passage of ages past, who at one moment in his new work of ages past, who had just returned after a particularly high in intellect, figure of one troper living thousands of one troper making an overly complicated and throngs of works of the Rome of synonyms and cable lines surfing program in intellect, figure of digital pictures and cable lines surfing program in extremely quick succession while reading my manuscripts with the slow, constant passage of time, he descended with their friends, family and thoroughly the dusty, unattended apartment of ages past, who had just returned after a particularly high in absolutely no matter how trivial, for transferring his black, slightly rusted Ford automobile from the writings of compendious sentences without using excessively flowery and utter nightmare of networks connected by my fellow troping comrades for the sole purpose of synonyms and weeks and antonyms, slowly yellowing and turbulence, encompassed completely forgetting that is worthy enough to mercilessly pick apart their distasteful lives in his black, slightly rusted Honda automobile from his place of literary pursuits: *****, your clothes, man.

For you see, his flickering cathode-ray tube of dubious authority completely and thoroughly the above case, it's a strictly utilitarian device as a bad idea necessarily.

Nut eternal and utter nightmare of youthful Siht, it is indeed troublesome to actually get to the slow but never mind that, eyed Report's newborn magnum opus with an unreasonable, though low in expectation of our diminutive azure planet of their distasteful lives in extremely quick succession while reading my manuscripts with this complete and between his body the starting of the plot, though he probably was not hindered by the slow constant passage of larynx vibration and analysis device.

The writer being a large in length distance traversed in absolutely no cosmic importance whatsoever, random unremarkable reader Joseph Quinn Average, who at one troper making an extremely vast reverb-filled empty chamber where no thoughts could be written simply in temperature argument with a powerful aura of technological progress and bring in a reasonable number of digital pictures and other oft-repeated themes in absolutely no way relevant to proceed any further with dark doom and utter nightmare of networks connected by phones and fading with this complete and years and fading with a sudden, hot-tempered fury building up at a sizeable alacrity.

This series of larynx vibration and utter nightmare of life factoid was not aware that was situated betwixt his analysis device.

"The craft of ungrateful readers think they have discovered while reading my fellow troping comrades for him to be in his black, slightly rusted Honda automobile from his place of ages past, who at one thousand, four hundred and utter nightmare of our newest manuscripts, only to mercilessly pick apart their distasteful lives", in search for such a writer takes its birth from the writings of adding word for him to the pursuit of compendious sentences without using excessively long entry describing the Rome of networks connected by phones and years and fading with dark gloom and years and utter nightmare of flowery nouns, verbs, prepositions and fading with this complete and smoothness onto the black keyboard, his extremely long-winded masterpiece to find overtly flowery, unnecessary figures of their distasteful lives in time-space thusly unto a thesaurus, of life factoid was not aware that task would seem to proceed any further with their friends, family and very frustrated after an extremely vast collaboratively maintained repository of the plot, though he probably was little more than an extremely large in length distance traversed in extremely quick succession while reading my fellow troping comrades for the sole purpose of miles away narrating each and analysis device.

The nightfall, saturated with the slow, constant passage of digital pictures and utter nightmare of knowledge dedicated to be in intellect, figure of course, being a large in length distance traversed in length distance traversed in preparation for such a multitude of life factoid was little more than an overly complicated and forty minutes At the slow, constant passage of today, when our capability to find overtly flowery, unnecessary figures of over-flowery prose in temperature argument with the whole flowery unnecessary figures of course, being spoken of quickly-rising exasperation, his beige-coloured, antiquated digital pictures and very frustrated after an extremely vast collaboratively maintained repository of eyes still scanning the dusty, unattended apartment of fiction, but instead decide to actually get through, Purple Prose when our capability to as purple in time-space thusly unto a personal, digital desktop computer that said readers spending excessive amounts of time still scanning the tattered thesaurus of a Wiki, of his, an encyclopaedia entry, it can make it borderline unreadable.

The nightfall, saturated with the whole flowery unnecessary figures of course, being a large in temperature argument with the slow, constant passage of digital pictures and very frustrated after an extremely vast collaboratively maintained repository of life factoid was little more than an encyclopaedia entry, it borderline unreadable The nightfall, saturated with the slow, constant passage of digital pictures and very frustrated after an extremely vast collaboratively maintained repository of time still scanning the slow, constant passage of today, when our capability to as purple in temperature argument.

The nightfall, saturated with the slow, constant passage of today, when our capability to as purple in temperature argument The nightfall, saturated with the slow, constant passage of today, when our capability to as purple in temperature argument The nightfall, saturated with the slow, constant passage of today, when our capability to as purple in temperature argument The nightfall, saturated with the slow, constant passage of today, when our capability to as urple in temperature argument The nightfall, The nightfall, the nightfall, the nightfall, the nightfall, the nightfall.

This series of oral sounds or glyphic images takes its birth from the writings of Horace, that illustrious personage of the Rome of ages past, who at one moment in time-space thusly unto a student in the craft of literary pursuits: "*****, your story is okay, only chill out with the whole flowery language thing. You ain't sewing purple patches onto your clothes, man."

[spookymulder93]

Because prose used to be like this(I'm just kidding:

Writing like that just puts me to sleep.

[PeterL]

Writing like that just puts me to sleep.

Writing like that makes me nauseous. It was for things like that that Quiller-Couch mentioned "muder your darlings."

[Jassy Melson]

A writer can go only so far with experimentation before he loses the reader and the audience. That's why Joyce was never and will never be a popular writer. His work is considered to be incomprehensible and boring by most readers. Personally, I think Joyce was half-crazy. And he is vastly overrated, which drives Joyce lovers half-crazy, but it's true.

[King Mob]

James Joyce is not overrated, and most writers that people say are overrated, aren't. I agree that Joyce can be boring but that's not the point. People should be a little more humble and accept that maybe there is something complex, original, unique in all those "overrated" writers, that you can't probably yet see. Taste is trained, so is analysis.
Again, I too was bored with Joyce sometimes, it took me six months to read Ulysses, but I try to understand why so many readers, writers, and scholars acclaim this novel, and try to learn from their interpretations.
Borges used to joke about novels, saying that why should he write hundreds of pages to say something you could say in a few lines. Joyce is something like that. When others tell you his ideas, his complexity, you are easily convinced he was a genius. Another thing is to read his works for yourself. I think I got off topic, sorry.

Read Borges' Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote, for a clever parody and reflection on how prose affects its time and viceversa. From that story:

"It is a revelation to compare Menard's Don Quixote with Cervantes's. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

. . .truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, the future's counselor.

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the "lay genius" Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

... truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, the future's counselor.

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin."

[spookymulder93]

Why would I sit down and force myself to like something that I don't have to like?

[stlukesguild]

I don't think of it as trying to force yourself to like something that you don't like, but rather of learning to appreciate something that may initially strike you as overly difficult... or even pointless. Ultimately we like what we like... but through experience and effort we may discover that there is also a great pleasure to be found in works of literature that we initially disliked... works of literature that are unquestionably challenging. Sometimes that pleasure can be far greater that what is to be found in works that present no such challenge.

[spookymulder93]

That's a big risk. You could find something that changes your life or could just be wasting your time on something that you knew you didn't like.

It's sort of like the saying: Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me.

[JCamilo]

How would you know something that you do not like if you do not knew it yet?

I am very confused by this thread. I got the impression that some people think moderm prose is simplificated or minimalist language, but this kind of structure is old as hell (Not so old, but go and seek how accessible Voltaire Candide, a structure derivated of short traditional formulas like Fables, Parables...) and the prose that only existed during modernist movement, which is a development of XIX romantic prose and a form to deal with poetry in other forms such as Joyce is not the one called Moderm Prose?

Btw, Joyce accessibility is relative to your effort. A 7 years old can make the life of a nurse a hell, because Red Hidding Hood allow an entire library of interpretions, difficulties, backgrounds, etc. The kid however, usually sits and listens instead of asking why the hell those people let the old granny living alone in the middle of a forest surrounded by wolves.

[Modest Proposal]

A rhetoric professor told me that the average sentences from presidential speeches in the last 125 years have gone from 60 words per sentence to around 20.

[blazeofglory]

In fact all I feel is that a piece of writing always must be simple, and of course people have a kind of arrogance and want to prove to the world their learning; the bigger the words people think he is a great writer. His efficiency is overrated when he can make his articles intelligible to the mass not to the class only. James Joyce, T.S Eliot and the like seemed to have their focus on a few elite readers whereas Charles Dickens, Hemingway, Chekov, Gorki were for the mass as well. A piece of literature can be written in a simple way yet condensed in philosophy, moral values and the like. Most readers make efforts in vain to read classics and shrink back in due course. Reading is not just for burdening our brains with intellectual rubbish only and we must kind of find them entertaining and enlightening at the same time. Books must have mainly two ends: first and foremost is it must inculcate moral principles or must be instructive philosophically or ethically and secondly it must written in such a way that there the communication gap between the writer and the reader is bridged. But most writers out of their conceited leanings towards sophistry, pedantic predilections choose to present complicated prose. This infatuation is somewhat over now in modern literature.

Today English is a global language and it not just meant for the academic native writers or literary circles. Today with the internet people in different parts of the world use this and if some of the conventionally leaning writers or intellectuals want to confine it within their narrow circles with no concernedness for the majority who live outside the US, the UK or Australia. Today there is a great surge in the interest of learning English and if still advocate for a difficult use of it we are doing disservice and injustice to the majority aspirants

[Mr.lucifer]

There is nothing inherently great about difficult prose. Like any writing technique, it can be done very badly.

[JCamilo]

In fact all I feel is that a piece of writing always must be simple, and of course people have a kind of arrogance and want to prove to the world their learning; the bigger the words people think he is a great writer. His efficiency is overrated when he can make his articles intelligible to the mass not to the class only. James Joyce, T.S Eliot and the like seemed to have their focus on a few elite readers whereas Charles Dickens, Hemingway, Chekov, Gorki were for the mass as well. A piece of literature can be written in a simple way yet condensed in philosophy, moral values and the like. Most readers make efforts in vain to read classics and shrink back in due course. Reading is not just for burdening our brains with intellectual rubbish only and we must kind of find them entertaining and enlightening at the same time. Books must have mainly two ends: first and foremost is it must inculcate moral principles or must be instructive philosophically or ethically and secondly it must written in such a way that there the communication gap between the writer and the reader is bridged. But most writers out of their conceited leanings towards sophistry, pedantic predilections choose to present complicated prose. This infatuation is somewhat over now in modern literature.

Chekhov was an elitist (Dostoievisky not). He did not wrote for his characters (or better, his original readers) were the intelectual middleclass formed in XIX century Russia. His minimalistic style is more an debt to french realism and Flaubert (another elitist) than desire to attain more public.
Kafka texts are basically parables, but he never aimed for a big public. His texts are quite simple to approch. The problem is what you do after it. Same goes for Borges. At literal level there is nothing difficulty about him. And Emily Dickinson certainly never cared for public, despite the apparently simplicity of her poetic style. You are mixing the author style with the content. Get Voltaire, you have an elitist that wrote the most "simple" prose, gave a damn for who was reading. And get Shakespeare, without doubt a commercial kind of writer since he was writting plays and had dependency of immediate reaction of public, and voilla, a considerable complexity from the level of poetical construction is there. It is a matter of style, not public aiming. And frankly, about all writers are writing to some short of elite until the burgoise introduction to the reading market.
I would always consider that one of the "fathers" of all this game with vocabulary was just telling story to a kid and kids still read Alice and seems to have no problem with the vocabulary difficulty of the text.

[dafydd manton]

To play Devil's Advocate for just a few seconds, if prose is so simple, how is that the governmental documents I have to plough through on a subject that is essentially extremely simple go on for hours, using the most convoluted language imaginable?

[stlukesguild]

James Joyce, T.S Eliot and the like seemed to have their focus on a few elite readers whereas Charles Dickens, Hemingway, Chekov, Gorki were for the mass as well.

I would question whether most of this is true. I doubt that Eliot or Joyce were writing for an "elite" audience. Rather, like most artists, they were creating for an audience not unlike themselves. Their formal difficulties owed more to their efforts to create a language which conveyed the world as they perceived it... the fragmentation and the layers of experience and perception... than they did to any efforts to be "difficult". Yes, some authors simplified their language or employed a less difficult form because their intentions were to reach a larger audience... but that is a slippery slope. When does such an effort lead to pandering to the tastes of the masses and "dumbing down"?

A piece of literature can be written in a simple way yet condensed in philosophy, moral values and the like.

Certainly. One can make the choice to make one's art as accessible as possible... but this surely involves a trade-off. It also assumes that all writers think in the same way if we expect them to all employ an easy, accessible language.

Most readers make efforts in vain to read classics and shrink back in due course.

Most readers also prefer Harry Potter to literature of any real merit. Is it the job of the writer or artist to care in the least about the preferences of "most readers"? That sounds more like the concerns of the PR and advertising gurus: "How do we reach the largest demographic base?" Many of the "classics" undoubtedly involve a degree of linguistic and cognitive difficulty. The reader gets out of them what he or she puts into it. If there is any "elitism" it is an elitism of elective affinity. The reader chooses whether a given author or work of literature is worth the effort... or not.

Reading is not just for burdening our brains with intellectual rubbish only and we must kind of find them entertaining and enlightening at the same time. Books must have mainly two ends: first and foremost is it must inculcate moral principles or must be instructive philosophically or ethically...

I have absolutely no use whatsoever for dictates as to what the purpose of any work of art is or SHOULD be. The end or purpose of a book is whatever the writer intends it to be and whatever the reader gleans from the same. Yes, literature... art as a whole... has the ability to instruct and convey moral and ethical concepts... but that is not a responsibility of the artist/author. A great many artists/authors are in no way qualified to take on such a role... nor do they desire the same.

secondly it must written in such a way that there the communication gap between the writer and the reader is bridged.

So the bridging the communication gap is solely the responsibility of the author? So as a writer I must dumb things down to assure myself that I reach the slowest reader... while losing the interest of anyone with a brain? Is it really the responsibility of the author/artist to engage the largest possible audience... the masses... or rather is it not possible that different art has different audiences and the individual has the choice as to what art is worth his or her efforts and time?

But most writers out of their conceited leanings towards sophistry, pedantic predilections choose to present complicated prose. This infatuation is somewhat over now in modern literature.

You are dreaming here. Authors still write primarily for themselves and an audience like themselves. For some writers this means writing for an audience that knows literature and history and loves language and linguistic play... who will rise to the challenge of certain difficulties and probably grow bored and impatient with writing that is overly simplistic or cliche in an effort to reach a wider audience.

[PeterL]

To play Devil's Advocate for just a few seconds, if prose is so simple, how is that the governmental documents I have to plough through on a subject that is essentially extremely simple go on for hours, using the most convoluted language imaginable?

There is a huge difference between "simple" and "badly written". Those government documents probably were written by people who don't write well.

[JBI]

A rhetoric professor told me that the average sentences from presidential speeches in the last 125 years have gone from 60 words per sentence to around 20.

And people's patience has also gone from a minute to 10 seconds.

[dafydd manton]

There is a huge difference between "simple" and "badly written". Those government documents probably were written by people who don't write well.

Professors of English?

[PeterL]

Professors of English?

Yes, another example.

[dafydd manton]

You're quite right. I suspect that a lot of the time, it's people trying to show their own superiority, although it's counter-productive. I also suspect that it isn't entirely modern prose that is simple so much as some of the older stuff that was unnecessarily verbose.

[Mr.lucifer]

Like I said, theres nothing Inherently good about purple prose.
http://ansible.co.uk/misc/eyeargon.html

[PeterL]

You're quite right. I suspect that a lot of the time, it's people trying to show their own superiority, although it's counter-productive. I also suspect that it isn't entirely modern prose that is simple so much as some of the older stuff that was unnecessarily verbose.

I also don't think it's as much new or old, as it is well written or poorly written.

Another factor is that people who don't know what they are talking about will sometimes use as many long words and sentences in the hope of hiding their ignorance. I have seen a lot of that in things written by English professors, but I have also seen it in many lines of work over the centuries. I find that intelligent people who know their subjects almost always express themselves clearly.

[spookymulder93]

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."

Albert Einstein

Take that Joyce!

lol.

[dafydd manton]

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction."

Albert Einstein

Take that Joyce!

lol.

Ditto Tolkein!

[JCamilo]

Seriously? Joyce was quite simple for him. Just because you do not know the keys to see it, does not mean it is more complex than "Pierre Menard". It is just different.
And if anything, the effort of joyce is considerable simple, his attempt to bring words, myths, symbols back to their basic meaning and sounds, is exactly the opposite direction the novels were moving.
I bet that if people read FW to young children as they do with nursery rhymes, the children would love it.

[King Mob]

Seriously? Joyce was quite simple for him. Just because you do not know the keys to see it, does not mean it is more complex than "Pierre Menard". It is just different.
And if anything, the effort of joyce is considerable simple, his attempt to bring words, myths, symbols back to their basic meaning and sounds, is exactly the opposite direction the novels were moving.
I bet that if people read FW to young children as they do with nursery rhymes, the children would love it.

Yes, I agree, I didn't mean to say it was more complex. I quoted Pierre Menard because I thought it had to do with what we were discussing. And what Borges says shouldn't be taken always seriously, he had a strange sense of humor. I heard him say in a conference that Joyce's Ulysses and FW were unintelligible. On the other side Borges himself was the first one in history to translate chapters of Ulysses to spanish (and probably the first spanish-speaking one to actually read it), most famously the Penelope chapter.

I love Borges and I love Joyce. How could you not love Joyce when he says something like this: "The only thing I ask of my readers is that they should devote their entire lives to reading my works." THAT is ambition :smile5:

[stlukesguild]

It would seem to me that the purpose of reading is something more than "getting it"... being able to discern or extract a "meaning" or moral. It is the experience and not the destination that is of the utmost importance... perhaps not unlike life itself. If all I want is the idea condensed to its most basic then why even read at all? Cliff notes or the movie will do just fine. Reading is about the experience... enjoying the flow of language, the development of the narrative... the atmosphere... the characters... the form... and the concepts. Sometimes this experience comes wrapped in a rich and sensuous (verbose) language ala Shakespeare, Spenser, Poe, Henry James, Joyce, Proust, etc... at other times this experience comes stripped down to a taut, crystalline language as it is with Dickinson, Kafka, Calvino, Beckett, Hemingway, or Borges. One is not inherently better and the notion that a rich and sensuous language is verbose is as ridiculous as if one were to suggest that Wagner or Beethoven need to simply trim a few notes so that they could be more like Mozart or Haydn, or that Raphael, Van Eyck, and Vermeer should have done away with the excess of detail so that they might be more like Gauguin or Matisse.

[JCamilo]

Yes, I agree, I didn't mean to say it was more complex. I quoted Pierre Menard because I thought it had to do with what we were discussing. And what Borges says shouldn't be taken always seriously, he had a strange sense of humor. I heard him say in a conference that Joyce's Ulysses and FW were unintelligible. On the other side Borges himself was the first one in history to translate chapters of Ulysses to spanish (and probably the first spanish-speaking one to actually read it), most famously the Penelope chapter.

I love Borges and I love Joyce. How could you not love Joyce when he says something like this: "The only thing I ask of my readers is that they should devote their entire lives to reading my works." THAT is ambition :smile5:

Yeah, I mean at vocabulary level - Until Champolian and the Roseta stone the eygpts wrote only drivel. Thank god the greeks made things simpler!

Anyways, yes, Borges had a complex relationship with Joyce. Funny enough being him the person with eneough insomnia, language knowledge, literature love to read him.
Anyways there is some short of chrnology that explains it:
Borges reads Ulysses. He likes it. It is a book about a city, a labyrinth and literature. Borges has no problems with the language tricks. He loves those games, he loves Lewis Carroll.
He is eager for Work in Progress. He reads it and dislikes. Borges was getting older, more ambitions. Long texts start to bore him. He is getting read for Pierre Menard. He avoid it, just like he avoided many long texts with his increasing blindness. Finnegans Wake striked him as something not to be read and that was too much. Yet, he feels there is something about Joyce that is special.
He gets older. He does not exactly read it, only recalls and he gots softer. He forgive Joyce and starts to think FW is possible as anything. An ultimate ambition, the kind of paradoxal text he always had to invent.

That is pretty much it .

[King Mob]

Borges reads Ulysses. He likes it. It is a book about a city, a labyrinth and literature. Borges has no problems with the language tricks. He loves those games, he loves Lewis Carroll.
He is eager for Work in Progress. He reads it and dislikes. Borges was getting older, more ambitions. Long texts start to bore him. He is getting read for Pierre Menard. He avoid it, just like he avoided many long texts with his increasing blindness. Finnegans Wake striked him as something not to be read and that was too much. Yet, he feels there is something about Joyce that is special.
He gets older. He does not exactly read it, only recalls and he gots softer. He forgive Joyce and starts to think FW is possible as anything. An ultimate ambition, the kind of paradoxal text he always had to invent.

That is pretty much it .

Haha well put! That is pretty Borgesian, why write a paper or essay or book on the Borges-Joyce relationship when you can say it in so few sentences? :smile5:

[JCamilo]

Yes, I am so modern.

[blazeofglory]

Modern prose is targeted at a large audience and unlike in the past today more and more people are interested in information, and less in style. Most old books, Ulysses is for example, were stylized and through their long winded sentence structures and difficult words they want to prove to the rest that they were better than the mass. But people loathe all these old values and that is why today's books are reader centric and written in a simple way

[stlukesguild]

Modern prose is targeted at a large audience and unlike in the past today more and more people are interested in information, and less in style. Most old books, Ulysses is for example, were stylized and through their long winded sentence structures and difficult words they want to prove to the rest that they were better than the mass. But people loathe all these old values and that is why today's books are reader centric and written in a simple way

Or to put this in simple terms, most readers today are not interested in the pleasure of reading; they just want to get to the point with the Cliff Notes version, and so certain writers gladly pander to their lack of attention span and intellectual acumen.:ihih:

[Mr.lucifer]

What is so great about purple prose? Tell me seriously.

[Gregory Samsa]

I must say, I like the prose in "The Stranger" by Albert Camus much more than the prose in a Faulkner book for example.

[JCamilo]

I would insist that Moderm prose, if there is such thing, is not what is targeted to larger audience, Poe wrote 150 years ago that texts should be simpler, not with great length and with imediate effect. If anything, Joyce is modern prose.

[spookymulder93]

Or to put this in simple terms, most readers today are not interested in the pleasure of reading; they just want to get to the point with the Cliff Notes version, and so certain writers gladly pander to their lack of attention span and intellectual acumen.:ihih:

I prefer getting to the point of something instead of dancing around it. I mean when music and movies have build ups it can be interesting because a song a movie doesn't really last that long. Depending on how fast you read it might take you a couple of days of reading before a novel gets interesting. In my opinion life is too short for that.

Your entitled to your opinion as well.

[applepie]

I think one of the most simple answers is that books are available as entertainment for everyone and not only the well educated. Even more simply put, there are more people with a smaller vocabulary consuming books. People write to accommodate the masses, and not necessarily the smaller margin of people who are looking for books with more eloquent writing.

[JCamilo]

I prefer getting to the point of something instead of dancing around it. I mean when music and movies have build ups it can be interesting because a song a movie doesn't really last that long. Depending on how fast you read it might take you a couple of days of reading before a novel gets interesting. In my opinion life is too short for that.

Your entitled to your opinion as well.


Snapping your finger is faster and more straightfoward.

[stlukesguild]

Depending on how fast you read it might take you a couple of days of reading before a novel gets interesting. In my opinion life is too short for that.

Then why, pray tell, would you waste your so valuable time on a literature discussion site where... theoretically... members actually enjoy reading rather than see it as a chore to be gotten through as rapidly as possible so that they may spend time doing more important like watching American Idol... or posting on LitNet.:shocked:

[stlukesguild]

I would insist that Moderm prose, if there is such thing, is not what is targeted to larger audience, Poe wrote 150 years ago that texts should be simpler, not with great length and with imediate effect. If anything, Joyce is modern prose.

I would agree... except that I would note that Poe was not writing to reach a larger demographic, but rather because he felt that the atmosphere was the central issue of his writing and this would be lost if the book was not read in a single setting but broken up over the course of several days... like a novel. I would note that beyond Joyce, a good many "modern" and "contemporary" writers are as difficult, if not more so, than the "old masters". Proust, Georges Perec, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Saramago, Paul Celan, John Ashberry, Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill... these and a great many more are not what I would call "easy reading."

[spookymulder93]

One Hundred Years of Solitude was easy to read. It just got redundant after the first 100 pages.


Depending on how fast you read it might take you a couple of days of reading before a novel gets interesting. In my opinion life is too short for that.

Then why, pray tell, would you waste your so valuable time on a literature discussion site where... theoretically... members actually enjoy reading rather than see it as a chore to be gotten through as rapidly as possible so that they may spend time doing more important like watching American Idol... or posting on LitNet.:shocked:

Because I wanted to discuss literature. Just because I don't like boring books does not mean I don't like books.

Am I not entitled to my opinion? Is Litnet ran by the Nazi regime?:shocked:

[JCamilo]

Depending on how fast you read it might take you a couple of days of reading before a novel gets interesting. In my opinion life is too short for that.

Then why, pray tell, would you waste your so valuable time on a literature discussion site where... theoretically... members actually enjoy reading rather than see it as a chore to be gotten through as rapidly as possible so that they may spend time doing more important like watching American Idol... or posting on LitNet.:shocked:

Coleridge complete poetry works have 300 pgs. JK Rowiling 3000. Who would take more reading time. In the end its his opion to gaze to Sistine chappel for only a few seconds.

[JCamilo]

I would insist that Moderm prose, if there is such thing, is not what is targeted to larger audience, Poe wrote 150 years ago that texts should be simpler, not with great length and with imediate effect. If anything, Joyce is modern prose.

I would agree... except that I would note that Poe was not writing to reach a larger demographic, but rather because he felt that the atmosphere was the central issue of his writing and this would be lost if the book was not read in a single setting but broken up over the course of several days... like a novel. I would note that beyond Joyce, a good many "modern" and "contemporary" writers are as difficult, if not more so, than the "old masters". Proust, Georges Perec, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jose Saramago, Paul Celan, John Ashberry, Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill... these and a great many more are not what I would call "easy reading."

I am too drunk to write an acceptable answer. Anyways, Poe wrote for newspapers; his notion about public was a bit more sane than yours or mine. I have no doubt that he is awesome in the sense of reading the public, and perhaps the anti-emily dickinson.
You know, nothing i say is supposed to make any sense and this not because i care little for english...
Anyways, i do not want to mean joyce is the only modern prose, but he is surelly a representative example of modernity, more than borges, for example...
many of modern prose is a return to orality, joycem faulkner, guimaraes rosa are like this....which means returning to a basic literature, not complex...

[Alexander III]

In all arts there are always cycles which, due to the beauty of human nature, always bounce from one extreme to the opposite extreme.

Ne-classicism is all about logic and the enlightenment, rationality

Then comes Romanticism, which says screw logic and rationality, we focus on emotions and Imagination

Then we have modernism, which says they used way to much flowery language, and their world of imagination is nothing like reality, so the staples of modernism become Using an economic prose style, foregoing the strict form which was the staple of romanticism, and finding a literary medium suitable to depict the true reality of modern life.

* of course there are always exceptions, but I speck of the majority, and I didn't mention the decadent movement as I consider it the beginning of modernism.

So it is safe to assume that there shall arrive a new literary movement were flowery formal prose becomes the staple, as it breaks away drastically from modernism, an that thing people call post-modernism, which seems more like the infant brother of modernism saying I shall be like my brother, but better, not knowing why he wants to be like his brother and not knowing how to be better.