At first, I thought this post would be about prison sentences.
I got curious and checked if DeepResearch would have anything to add. It agreed with your post and largely outlined the same categories (plus a few that you didn’t cover because you were focused on an earlier time than the screen era): “Cognitive Load & Comprehension, Mass Literacy & Broad Audiences, Journalism & Telegraphic Brevity, Attention Span & Media Competition, Digital Communication & Screen Reading, Educational & Stylistic Norms”.
The last one I thought was interesting and not obvious from your post:
Widespread literacy also had an effect on social norms. It wasn’t just that sentences got shorter to accommodate the average reader, but also that it became more socially expected that writers accommodate the reader rather than the reader being expected to live up to the elite demands. This was partially connected to the rise of compulsory schooling. Once you’re demanding that everyone learn to read, you kind of have to accommodate the limits of their abilities rather than just telling them “get good or gtfo”.
DR: More people could read, but to reach this broader audience, authors were compelled to write in a plainer style than the ornate constructions of previous centuries. We can view this as a shift in the social contract of writing: instead of readers straining to meet the text, the text was adjusted to meet the readers. Shorter sentences were a key part of that adjustment. [...] By the early 20th century, the norm had shifted – long-winded sentences were increasingly seen as bad style or poor communication, out of step with a society that valued accessibility.
(This claim seems like it matches common sense, though DR didn’t give me a cite for this specific bit so I’m unsure what it’s based on.)
DR also claimed that there was a “Plain Language movement” in the 1960s and 1970s, that among other things pushed for simpler sentences. Its only cite was to a blog article on readability.com, though Wikipedia also talks about it. You mentioned e.g. the Flesh-Kincaid formula in a descriptive sense, but it’s also prescriptive: once these kinds of formulas get popularized as respected measures of readability, it stands to reason that their existence would also drive sentence lengths down.
E.g. Wikipedia mentions that Pennsylvania was the first U.S. state to require that automobile insurance policies be written at no higher than a ninth-grade level (14–15 years of age) of reading difficulty, as measured by the F–K formula. This is now a common requirement in many other states and for other legal documents such as insurance policies.
There were a few other claims that seemed interesting at first but then turned to be hallucinated. Caveat deep researchor.
Re plain language movements, in the UK there were Gowers’ “Plain Words” books from around that time (link provides links to full texts). I read these a very long time ago, but I don’t recall if he spoke of sentence length, being mainly occupied with the choice of words.
At first, I thought this post would be about prison sentences.
I got curious and checked if DeepResearch would have anything to add. It agreed with your post and largely outlined the same categories (plus a few that you didn’t cover because you were focused on an earlier time than the screen era): “Cognitive Load & Comprehension, Mass Literacy & Broad Audiences, Journalism & Telegraphic Brevity, Attention Span & Media Competition, Digital Communication & Screen Reading, Educational & Stylistic Norms”.
The last one I thought was interesting and not obvious from your post:
Widespread literacy also had an effect on social norms. It wasn’t just that sentences got shorter to accommodate the average reader, but also that it became more socially expected that writers accommodate the reader rather than the reader being expected to live up to the elite demands. This was partially connected to the rise of compulsory schooling. Once you’re demanding that everyone learn to read, you kind of have to accommodate the limits of their abilities rather than just telling them “get good or gtfo”.
DR: More people could read, but to reach this broader audience, authors were compelled to write in a plainer style than the ornate constructions of previous centuries. We can view this as a shift in the social contract of writing: instead of readers straining to meet the text, the text was adjusted to meet the readers. Shorter sentences were a key part of that adjustment. [...] By the early 20th century, the norm had shifted – long-winded sentences were increasingly seen as bad style or poor communication, out of step with a society that valued accessibility.
(This claim seems like it matches common sense, though DR didn’t give me a cite for this specific bit so I’m unsure what it’s based on.)
DR also claimed that there was a “Plain Language movement” in the 1960s and 1970s, that among other things pushed for simpler sentences. Its only cite was to a blog article on readability.com, though Wikipedia also talks about it. You mentioned e.g. the Flesh-Kincaid formula in a descriptive sense, but it’s also prescriptive: once these kinds of formulas get popularized as respected measures of readability, it stands to reason that their existence would also drive sentence lengths down.
E.g. Wikipedia mentions that Pennsylvania was the first U.S. state to require that automobile insurance policies be written at no higher than a ninth-grade level (14–15 years of age) of reading difficulty, as measured by the F–K formula. This is now a common requirement in many other states and for other legal documents such as insurance policies.
There were a few other claims that seemed interesting at first but then turned to be hallucinated. Caveat deep researchor.
Re plain language movements, in the UK there were Gowers’ “Plain Words” books from around that time (link provides links to full texts). I read these a very long time ago, but I don’t recall if he spoke of sentence length, being mainly occupied with the choice of words.