Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?

[-]TAG7mo409

What is a sentence anyway... is there something special about a period, as opposed to other punctuation marks? Many are available: the colon is a possibility; also its half-brother; and the comma,of course...also the ellipsis -- even the mighty m-dash!

[-]bfinn7mo156

Orwell noted that the semicolon is almost redundant. I wonder if sentences that once would have had a semicolon half way through are now split into two sentences.

[-]MondSemmel7mo110

Sourcing the Orwell quote:

This mermaid of the punctuation world—period above, comma below—is viewed with suspicion by many people, including well-known writers. George Orwell deliberately avoided semicolons in his novel Coming Up for Air (London: V. Gollancz, 1939). As he explained to his editor (Roger Senhouse) at the time, “I had decided … that the semicolon is an unnecessary stop and that I would write my next book without one” (quoted in George Orwell: The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, in Vol. 4: In Front of Your Nose, Jaffrey, NH: David R. Godine, 2000). Kurt Vonnegut had this advice for writers: “First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college” (A Man Without a Country, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005).
[...] British journalist Lynne Truss affirmed that “a full stop ought always to be an alternative” to the semicolon (Eats, Shoots & Leaves, New York: Gotham Books, 2004). The American writer Noah Lukeman views the semicolon as a mark more suitable for creative writing. Otherwise, he argues, “The first thing to realize is that

... (read more)

2DirectedEvolution7mo

Semicolons are unnecessary? That doesn’t go far enough. Cormac McCarthy got rid of quotation marks, most commas, and almost exterminated the colon.

[-]MondSemmel7mo*1711

The colon seems optional to me, but quotation marks absolutely aren't, as evidenced by how comparatively unreadable this author's dialogue looks. From his book "The Road":

He screwed down the plastic cap and wiped the bottle off with a rag and hefted it in his hand. Oil for their little slutlamp to light the long gray dusks, the long gray dawns. You can read me a story, the boy said. Cant you, Papa? Yes, he said. I can.

That already looks unnecessarily hard to read even though the dialogue is so short. I guess the author made it work somehow, but this seems like artificially challenging oneself to write a novel without the letter 'E': intriguing, but not beneficial to either reader or prose.

[-]DirectedEvolution7mo218

I respectfully disagree. As with the minor edit on the Boccaccio quote in another of my comments here, eliminating quotes fundamentally changes the way we interpret the scene.

With quotes (and especially with the way dialog is typically paragraphed), human speech is implicitly shown to be so drastically separate from the sensory component of the scene that it requires completely different formatting from the rest of the text.

By eliminating quotes and dialog paragraphing, human speech becomes just another element in the scene being depicted, not separate or any more or less important than the action of screwing down the plastic cap or the functional importance of the oil in the lamp.

The absence of quotes only makes it harder to read if you, the reader, resist this aesthetic and try to force the dialog to be of greater importance than McCarthy is allowing it to be in his novel.

He screwed down the plastic cap and wiped the bottle off with a rag and hefted it in his hand. Oil for their little slutlamp to light the long gray dusks, the long gray dawns.
"You can read me a story," the boy said. "Cant you, Papa?"
"Yes," he said. "I can."

See how the social interaction between Papa and th... (read more)

9MondSemmel7mo

I see. I guess I can appreciate that the style is aiming for a particular aesthetic, but for me it's giving up more in clarity than it gains in aesthetic. In a phrasing like "Cant you, Papa? Yes, he said. I can." I have to think about who each part of the dialogue belongs to, and which parts are even dialogue, all due to the missing quotation marks. This style reads to me like someone removed a bunch of parentheses from a math formula, ones which may not be strictly necessary if one knows about some non-universal order of operations. This may look prettier in some sense, but in exchange it will definitely confuse a fraction of readers. I personally don't think this tradeoff is worth it.

9DirectedEvolution7mo

That's a valid reaction. However, my take is that removal of the quotes is aesthetically useful precisely because it complicates our ability to parse the words as dialog and muddles that sort of naive clarity. Spoken words are sounds, sounds are part of the environment, and it is both a choice and an effort to parse those sounds as dialog. Most authors opt to do this work for the reader through punctuation, which also enforces interpreting these passages as dialog first and sounds second, if at all. McCarthy makes it easier to interpret spoken words as sounds that are part of the environment. If your aim as a reader is to parse dialog, it will be harder to do this in a McCarthy novel. If your aim is instead to have an aesthetic experience of spoken words as sensation interlaced with other impressions of the environment, then McCarthy's method of punctuation makes this simpler (and even plants the suggestion that this might be something you as a reader might want to do, if you hadn't considered the possibility before).

4Daphne_W6mo

3Roger Scott6mo

Given that the default, non-quotation text is not, in general, describing sounds in the environment, why do you think a reader would interpret unquoted text as environmental sounds rather than as simply more of the author's description of goings on in the scene? I can see that presenting spoken words in some format that allows or encourages their interpretation as environmental might be artistically useful, I just don't see that removing the quotation marks from otherwise-quoted dialog accomplishes that.

3DirectedEvolution6mo

By environment, I mean the setting of the scene. Spoken words are sounds in the setting, like the sound of the wind, a gunshot, or an animal’s cry. It just happens that a human voice box is what’s making those particular sounds. McCarthy’s central theme across all the novels of his that I’ve read is the inhumanity of the Mexican-American frontier, and treating human speech as just a sound among other sounds is a key part of how he expresses that theme in his writing style.

4Roger Scott6mo

That still leaves the question of how the reader is to distinguish a sound (speech) from a description of sounds.

3DirectedEvolution6mo

Can you give an example?

1wslafleur6mo

Bang he said they wouldn't fire she replied it happened anyway they concurred. If the author wants this sentence to be interpreted one way or the other, they should utilize standard punctuation. Your avant garde approach to literature notwithstanding.

8TsviBT7mo

A longer sentence is produced by, and is asking the reader to be, putting more things together in the same [momentary working memory context]. Has advantages and disadvantages, but is not the same.

3Mateusz Bagiński7mo

Since this is about written English text (or maybe more broadly, text in Western languages written in Latinic or Cyrillic), the criterion is: ends with a dot, starts with an uppercase letter.

5TAG7mo

Then the phenomenon could be stem from punctuation habits, as @bfinn says. Did you notice that my original comment doesn't contain a sentence, by your standards?

2Kenoubi7mo

Question marks and exclamation points are dots with an extra bit. Ellipses may be multiple dots, but also indicate an uncertain end to the sentence. (Formal usage distinguishes "..." for ellipses in arbitrary position and "...." for ellipses coming after a full stop, but the latter is rarely seen in any but academic writing, and I would guess even many academics don't notice the difference these days.)

[-]DirectedEvolution7mo260

Interestingly, breaking up long sentences into shorter ones by replacing a transitional word with a period does not quite capture the same nuance as the original. Here's a translation of Boccaccio, and a version where I add a period in the middle.

Wherefore, as it falls to me to lead the way in this your enterprise of storytelling, I intend to begin with one of His wondrous works, that, by hearing thereof, our hopes in Him, in whom is no change, may be established, and His name be by us forever lauded.
Wherefore, as it falls to me to lead the way in this your enterprise of storytelling, I intend to begin with one of His wondrous works. By hearing thereof, our hopes in Him, in whom is no change, may be established, and His name be by us forever lauded.

By replacing ", that," with a period, my revision completely changes our relationship with the narrator. In the original translation, the narrator is both announcing his goal and describing what he plans to do to achieve it.

In the revised version, he's describing his plan of action and a potential effect of that plan. We might assume that he's choosing that plan in order to bring about that effect, but it's no longer explicit in the text... (read more)

[-]kave7mo*245

I quite like the article The Rise and Fall of the English Sentence, which partially attributes reduced structural complexity to increase in noun compounds (like "state hate crime victim numbers" rather than "the numbers of victims who have experienced crimes that were motivated by hatred directed at their ethnic or racial identity, and who have reported these crimes to the state")

[-]Judd Rosenblatt7mo170

Reading this post, my immediate hunch is that the decline in sentence lengths has a lot to do with the historical role of Latin grammar and how deeply it influenced educated English writers. Latin inherently facilitates longer, complex sentences due to its use of grammatical inflections, declensions, and verb conjugations, significantly reducing reliance on prepositions and conjunctions. This syntactic flexibility allowed authors to naturally craft extensive yet smooth-flowing sentences. Latin's liberating lack of fixed word order and its fun little rhetorical devices combine to support nuanced, flexible thinking. From my own experience studying Latin 7th-12th grade, I find this sort of stuff contributes significantly to freer, more expansive expression when writing or speaking in English, and I often can immediately tell when speaking with or reading something written by someone else who studied Latin. An easy "tell" is when they say "having done x."

Educated English writers historically learned Latin as a foundational part of their education, internalizing this syntactic complexity. As a result, English prose from authors like Chaucer, Samuel Johnson, and Henry James shows a clear... (read more)

5mruwnik7mo

Having studied Latin, or other such classical training, seems to be but one method of imbuing oneself with the the style of writing longer, more complicated sentences. Personally I acquired the taste for such eccentricities perusing sundry works from earlier times. Romances, novels and other such frivolities from, or set in, the 18-th century being the main culprits. I suppose this sort of proves your point, in that those authors learnt to create complicated sentences from learning Latin, and the later writers copied the style, thinking either that it's fun, correct, or wanting to seem more authentic.

2Judd Rosenblatt6mo

Cool point, yes, seems right!

[-]David Gross7mo17-6

There is a relatively new, practical reason to write short sentences: they are less likely to be mangled by automated translation software. Sentences often become long via multiple clauses. Automated translators can mangle such sentences by (for example) mistakenly applying words to the incorrect clause. If you split such sentences, you make such translations more reliable. Most of our writing now potentially has global reach. So you can be understood by more people if you meet translation software half-way.

3Guive7mo

I agree this would be a good argument for short sentences in 2019, but does it still apply with modern LLMs?

[-]Wei Dai7mo140

In China, there was a parallel, but more abrupt change from Classical Chinese writing (very terse and literary), to vernacular writing (similar to speaking language and easier to understand). I attribute this to Classical Chinese being better for signaling intelligence, vernacular Chinese being better for practical communications, higher usefulness/demand for practical communications, and new alternative avenues for intelligence signaling (e.g., math, science). These shifts also seem to be an additional explanation for decreasing sentence lengths in English.

[-]habryka6mo136

Promoted to curated: I don't think this post is earth-shattering, but it's good, short, and answers an interesting question, and does so with a reasonable methodology and curiosity. And it's not about AI, for once, which is a nice change of pace from our curation schedule these days.

[-]Mitchell_Porter7mo112

Humans didn't always speak in 50-word sentences. If you want to figure out how we came to be trending away from that, you should try to figure out how, when, and why that became normal in the first place.

[-]Kaj_Sotala7mo113

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 com

... (read more)

7Richard_Kennaway7mo

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.

[-]Mateusz Bagiński7mo112

Another related thing is that the grammar of languages appears to be getting simpler with time. Compare the grammar of Latin to that of modern French or Spanish. Or maybe not quite simpler but more structured/regular/principled, as something like the latter has been reproduced experimentally https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.1262 (to the extent that this paper's findings generalize to natural language evolution).

[-]simon7mo212

FWIW there is a theory that there is a cycle of language change, though it seems maybe there is not a lot of evidence for the isolating -> agglutinating step. IIRC the idea is something like that if you have a "simple" (isolating) language that uses helper words instead of morphology eventually those words can lose their independent meaning and get smushed together with the word they are modifying.

4TAG7mo

The idea that grammar is just inflection is misleading: languages that are mostly isolating can have complex ordering rules,like the the notorious adjective ordering of English. As for french ...Moi, je ne me défile pas. 1st person. Sing. 1st person. Sing, again. Negative. 1st person. Sing, reflexive. Verb!!! Negative,again.

4Mateusz Bagiński7mo

Fair enough. Modify my claim to "languages tend to move from fusional to analytic (or something like that) as their number of users expands".

1Raphael Roche6mo

Redundancy makes sure the information passes through. In French, the word 'aujourd'hui' ('today') etymologically means 'au jour de ce jour' ('on the day of this day'), but it is not uncommon to say 'au jour d'aujourd'hui' which would literally mean 'on the day of on the day of this day'. It is also common to say 'moi, je' ('me, I') and increasingly people even say 'moi, personnellement, je' ('me, personally, I'). This represents a kind of emphasis but also a kind of fashion, simular to what happens in the fashion industry, or a kind of drift, similar to what happens in the evolution of species.

[-]cdt7mo104

This may be because editing has become easier and faster to iterate.

It's comparatively easy to identify sentences that are too long. Is it easy to identify sentences that are too short? You can always add an additional sentence, but finding examples where sentences themselves should be longer is much harder. With more editing cycles, this leads to shorter and shorter sentences.

1Hugo Villeneuve6mo

I had the same insight. Older writings would be closer to oral form with abundant disgressions. Modern text processing alows for evermore edits where the flow progressively gets structured with shorter sentences in the right order.

[-]JenniferRM7mo*81

I tend to follow the linguist, McWhorter, on historical trends in languages over time, in believing (controversially!) that undisrupted languages become weirder over time, and only gains learnability through pragmatic pressures, as in trading, slavery, conquest, etc which can increase the number of a language's second language learners (who edit for ease of learning as they learn).

A huge number of phonemes? Probably its some language in the mountains with little tourism, trade, or conquest for the last 8,000 years. Every verb conjugates irregularly? Likely... (read more)

4Mateusz Bagiński7mo

Persian is ungendered too. They don't even have gendered pronouns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_grammar

3JenniferRM7mo

Thank you for the correction! I didn't realize Persian descended from PIE too. Looking at the likely root cause of my ignorance, I learned that Kurdish and Pashto are also PIE descended. Pashto appears to have noun gender, but I'm getting hints that at least one dialect of Kurdish also might not?! If Sorani doesn't have gendered nouns then I'm going to predict (1) maybe Kurdish is really old and weird and interesting (like branching off way way long ago with more time to drift) and/or (2) there was some big trade/empire/mixing simplification that happened "more recently" with divergence later? If neither of those are true, then my larger heuristic about "why English is weird" might have a deep abstract counter example, and deserve lower credence. Persian is a language of empire and social mixing, so its "similar simplification" doesn't actually function as a strong counter-example to the broader thesis, but it is still great to be surprised :-)

1Raphael Roche6mo

This is interesting. I think English concentrates its weirdness in pronunciation, which is very irregular. Although adult native speakers don't realize it, this presents a serious learning difficulty for non-native speakers and young English-speaking children. Studies show that English-speaking students need more years of learning to master their language (at least for reading) than French students do, who themselves need more years than young Italian, Spanish or Finnish students (Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the brain).

3JenniferRM6mo

I think most of that is actually a weirdness in our orthography. To linguists, languages are, fundamentally a thing that happens in the mouth and not on the page. In the mouth, the hardest thing is basically rhoticism... the "tongue curling back" thing often rendered with "r". The Irish, Scottish, and American accents retain this weirdness, but a classic Boston, NYC, or southern British accents tends to drop it. The Oxford English Dictionary gives two IPA transcriptions for "four": the American /fɔr/ makes sense to me and has an "r" in it, but the British is /fɔː/ has just totally given up on curling the tongue or trying to pretend in the dictionary that this is happening in human mouths. That tongue curl is quite hard. Quite a few five year olds in rural Idaho (and maybe regions where rhotic dialects are maintained) often struggle with it, and are corrected by teachers and parents (and maybe made fun of by peers) for not speaking properly... for spontaneously adopting "a New York Accent" due a very common a childhood "speech impediment". Many ESL speakers drop it, hence the city dialects dropping it, not just in practice in the mouth, but officially. ("J" is a runner up for weirdness in the mouth, but I think that's just because the voiced postaveolar affricate /dʒ/ is a pretty rare phoneme.) English orthography is kind of a disaster, I agree. It attempts to shoehorn a german/celtic/french/norse pidgin-or-creole into the latin letter system, and ... yeah. Tough task. It was never going to be clean. If I was going to offer a defense of the status quo here, I'd say that there is no flat/simple orthography to switch to. Every accent would need its own separate "spelling reform" and their texts would be less mutually intelligible, and it would hurt science and the letters quite a lot, and also probably lead to faster drift into a world where "English" denotes a language family rather than a language. Interestingly, Interslavic is an attempt to "design by hand" a

1Raphael Roche6mo

You're right. I said "pronunciation," but the problem is more exactly about the translation between graphemes and phonemes.

1Roger Scott6mo

I don't think children have any more difficulty learning to speak English than other languages. The difficulty comes in learning to spell in writing and, to a lesser extent, learning to pronounce written words when writing. Btw, there's actually much more regularity in English spelling/pronunciation than may appear, and than is routinely taught. Much of the "weirdness" is the result of historical processes which are fairly regular in themselves, once you know the rules.

[-]DirectedEvolution7mo82

Many short sentences can add up to a very long text. The cost of paper, ink, typesetting and distribution would incentivize using fewer letters, but not shorter sentences.

[-]leogao7mo7-3

shorter sentences are better because they communicate more clearly. i used to speak in much longer and more abstract sentences, which made it harder to understand me. i think using shorter and clearer sentences has been obviously net positive for me. it even makes my thinking clearer, because you need to really deeply understand something to explain it simply.

[-]Arjun Panickssery7mo270

Shorter sentences are better. Why? Because they communicate clearly. I used to speak in long sentences. And they were abstract. Thus I was hard to understand. Now I use short sentences. Clear sentences.

It's been net-positive. It even makes my thinking clearer. Why? Because you need to deeply understand something to explain it simply.

9leogao7mo

goodhart

[-]TsviBT7mo1417

Yes, and this also applies to your version! For difficult or subtle thoughts, short sentences have to come strictly after the long sentences. If you're having enough such thoughts, it doesn't make sense to restrict long sentences out of communication channels; how else are you supposed to have the thoughts?

2Linch6mo

Shorter sentences good. Why? They communicate clearly. Younger me spoke longer sentences. And abstract ones. People didn't get me. So I changed: short sentences. Clear sentences. It's net-positive. Think more clearly now, too. Why? Simpler explanations necessitate deeper understanding.

2Garrett Baker6mo

Smol r'\. (.*)\.'! y? Clear! Had big r'\. (.*)\.' b4. & abstract. ppl no get. Now: Smol. Clear. Good. Think clearer. y? Smol => deep.

4Mitchell_Porter6mo

小句子很好。为什么？清晰。我的句子又长又抽象。不清楚。现在简短清晰了。很好。思路清晰。为什么？简单需要深刻。

[-]jmh7mo64

Literacy seems to make sense to me but I might be missing something in the post. Writing is language and language is communication so at least two sides.

As more people learned to read, they also learned to write, and written communications increases. However, even with modest literacy one can read a long sentence. Or can do that when it is written by a good/skilled writer. But being able to read does not really lead to writing skills in most cases I suspect.

As more people started communicating via writing (think things like schools and education expansion) the skill level of the average writer likely declined. That probably lead to training next generation writes to write in a more simple sentence structure.

[-]Elizabeth6mo50

I write shorter sentences thanks to the editing work of LW editor @JustisMills and the book Several Short Sentences About Writing.

[-]Linch6mo40

I wonder what the trend is across different languages, and whether that'd help shed some light on various hypotheses. For example, I rarely read Chinese, and even more rarely classical texts, but my vague impression is that older Chinese texts are understood to be much more semantically dense than modern Chinese books, which are slightly more semantically dense compared to English.

I can't find one with older Chinese and modern Chinese side-by-side (because most modern Chinese readers are expected to understand older vernacular and even classical Chin... (read more)

2Linch6mo

Let's flip through the hypotheses and see whether the evidence is compelling: Doesn't seem very plausible to me. In general smarter texts tend to have longer sentences, at least in English (compare academic journals to popular science articles, or HPMOR to Harry Potter). That said, maybe there's a Simpson's paradox thing going. Also, I'm less sure which direction it goes in Chinese, unfortunately. This seems eminently plausible to me. It's easier for me to hold a sentence in my head when reading quietly, than to express the whole idea with the right intonations if I were to read out loud. Somebody like Trump, with a more vernacular style, speak in shorter sentences than someone like Obama, with a more literary style. I do not find this plausible. I expect books to evolve to become more readable, rather than less, as writers collectively get more practice and we have greater cultural evolution.

1samuelshadrach6mo

Instead of just considering median member of the population, you can consider extremes. Some fraction of any population (be it Chinese or English) will want the most information dense writing possible. Some fraction will want more artistic language. Some fraction will want to be as illegible as possible. The difference I think is that Old English grammar did not allow very information dense writing, and English in 2025 allows more density. Even today though it seems obvious more density is possible, a lot of articles, pronouns etc seem optional to me. Changing rules of grammar is a slow process that requires buy-in from many people. Chinese grammar on the other hand allows higher density. Even if everyone today doesn't make use of it, a subset of the population that needs it can use it.

[-]Dmitry Vaintrob7mo31

Thanks for this post. I would argue that part of an explanation here could also be economic: modernity brings specialization and a move from the artisan economy of objects as uncommon, expensive, multipurpose, and with a narrow user base (illuminated manuscripts, decorative furniture) to a more utilitarian and targeted economy. Early artisans need to compete for a small number of rich clients by being the most impressive, artistic, etc., whereas more modern suppliers follow more traditional laws of supply and demand and track more costs (cost-effectiveness... (read more)

[-]Violet Hour7mo30

One small, anecdotal piece of support for your 'improved-readability' hypothesis: ime, contemporary French tends to use longer sentences than English, where I think (native Francophones feel free to correct me) there's much less cultural emphasis on writing 'accessibly'.

E.g., I'd say the (state-backed) style guidelines of Académie Française seem motivated by an ideal that's much closer to "beautiful writing" than "accessible writing". And a couple minutes Googling led me to footnote 5 of this paper, which implies that the concept of "reader-centred l... (read more)

2Raphael Roche6mo

You're right. The idea behind Académie française style guidelines is that language is not only about factual communication, but also an art, literature. Efficiency is one thing, aesthetics another. For instance, poetry conveys meaning or at least feeling, but in a strange way compared to prose. Poetry would not be very effective to describe an experimental protocol in physics, but it is usually more beautiful to read than the methodology section of a scientific publication. I also enjoy the 'hypotaxic' excerpt above much more than the 'parataxic' one. Rich sentences are not bad per se, they need more effort and commitment to read, but sometimes, if well written, give a greater reward, because complexity can hold more subtlety, more information. Short sentences are not systematically superior in all contexts; they can look as flat as a 2D picture compared to a 3D picture.

[-]eggsyntax7mo30

The average reader has gotten dumber and prefers shorter, simpler sentences.

I suspect that the average reader is now getting smarter, because there are increasingly ways to get the same information that require less literacy: videos, text-to-speech, Alexa and Siri, ten thousand news channels on youtube. You still need some literacy to find those resources, but it's fine if you find reading difficult and unpleasant, because you only need to exercise it briefly. And less is needed every year.

I also expect that the average reader of books is getting much smar... (read more)

3Kenoubi7mo

I agree that the average reader is probably smarter in a general sense, but they also have FAR more things competing for their attention. Thus the amount of intelligence available for reading and understanding any given sentence, specifically, may be lower in the modern environment.

2eggsyntax7mo

Interesting point. I'm not sure increased reader intelligence and greater competition for attention are fully countervailing forces -- it seems true in some contexts (scrolling social media), but in others (in particular books) I expect that readers are still devoting substantial chunks of attention to reading.

1Kenoubi7mo

That's possible, but what does the population distribution of [how much of their time people spend reading books] look like? I bet it hasn't changed nearly as much as overall reading minutes per capita has (even decline in book-reading seems possible, though of course greater leisure and wealth, larger quantity of cheaply and conveniently available books, etc. cut strongly the other way), and I bet the huge pile of written language over here has large effects on the much smaller (but older) pile of written language over there. (How hard to understand was that sentence? Since that's what this article is about, anyway, and I'm genuinely curious. I could easily have rewritten it into multiple sentences, but that didn't appear to me to improve its comprehensibility.) Edited to add: on review of the thread, you seem to have already made the same point about book-reading commanding attention because book-readers choose to read books, in fact to take it as ground truth. I'm not so confident in that (I'm not saying it's false, I really don't know), but the version of my argument that makes sense under that hypothesis would crux on books being an insufficiently distinct use of language to not be strongly influenced, either through [author preference and familiarity] or through [author's guesses or beliefs about [reader preference and familiarity]], by other uses of language.

2eggsyntax7mo

My focus on books is mainly from seeing statistics about the decline in book-reading over the years, at least in the US. Pulling up some statistics (without much double-checking) I see: (from here.) For 2023 the number of Americans who didn't read a book within the past year seems to be up to 46%, although the source is different and the numbers may not be directly comparable: (chart based on data from here.) That suggests to me that selection effects on who reads have gotten much stronger over the years. I do think it would have been better split into multiple sentences. That could be; I haven't seen statistics on reading in other media. My intuition is that many people find reading aversive and avoid it to the extent they can, and I think it's gotten much more avoidable over the past decade.

[-]ProgramCrafter7mo3-3

I suggest additional explanation.

The bigger the audience is, the more people there are who won't know a specific idea/concept/word (xkcd's comic #1053 "Ten Thousand" captures this quite succinctly), so you'll simply have to shorten.

I took logarithm of sentence length and linearly fitted it against logarithm of world population (that shouldn't really be precise since authors presumably mostly cared about their society, but that would be more time-expensive to check).

Relevant lines of Python REPL

>>> import math
>>> wps = [49, 50, 42, 20, 21,

... (read more)

5Kaj_Sotala7mo

Wouldn't people not knowing specific words or ideas be equally compatible with "you can't refer to the concept with a single word so you have to explain it, leading to longer sentences"?

[-]SebastianG6mo20

Sentence length is clearly a good proxy for the harder to measure "length of independent clause with its subordinates."

Although, I think it is helpful to bear in mind that punctuation marks at the end of a sentence are only a proxy for this, one can miss the forest for the trees.

[-]Kinrany6mo20

How does this correlate with vocabulary changes? If the common vocabulary expanded, is the information contents of sentences still decreasing?

[-]ryan_b6mo20

How do we count specialized language? By this I mean stuff like technical or scientific specialties, which are chock-full of jargon. The more specialized they are, the less they share with related topics. I would expect we do a lot more jargon generating now than before, and jargon words are mostly stand-ins for entire paragraphs (or longer) of explanation.
Related to jargon: academic publishing styles. Among other things, academic writing style is notorious for being difficult for outsiders to penetrate, and making no accommodation for the reader at all (e

... (read more)

[-]ethanelasky6mo20

With regards to the State of the Union address, one contributing factor might be the method of delivery. The State of the Union is now intended for a television or radio audience, whose spoken format favors shorter, more simple sentence structures when compared with print.

[-]worse6mo20

In school and out of it, I’d been told repeatedly my sentences were run-on, which, probably fair enough. I do think varying sentence length is nice, and trying to give your reader easier to consume media is nice. But sometimes you just wanna go on a big long ramble about an idea with all sorts of corollaries which seem like they should be a part of the main sentence, and it’s hard to know if they really should be a part of their own sentence. Probably, but maybe I defer too much to everyone who ever told me, this is a run-on.

1Roger Scott6mo

Run-on refers primarily to topic drift, not word count. You can have a fairly short run-on sentence where the end of the sentence is talking about something different than the beginning. Frequent use of "and" between clauses is a clue.

[-]ChristianKl7mo20

It's worth noting that we observe other forms of simplication of language as well. English reduced the amount of inflections of verbs. The distinction between singular and plural pronouns disappeared.

[-]avturchin7mo20

Paragraphs are also getting shorter. And music is getting louder.

[-]verzali5mo10

Does this pattern hold true for other languages too? English maybe something of an outlier among languages due to its global nature and that could drive a trend towards simplification. Or it could be "fashion". Advice for English writers usually puts emphasis on simplicity. I have a suspicion that is not as true in other languages - when I read books in Spanish I often notice a difference in style that seems more than just down to the language but that also hints at conventions about how to use the language.

[-]NickH5mo10

I don't see anything about exactly WHAT people were reading. Literacy, certainly nowadays, is not taught so that the masses are better able to experience classic literature but to enable them to transmit and receive factual information and instructions efficiently and effectively an this usage is inherently more suited to shorter sentences. We now live in a time when the fraction of all knowledge that anyone can ever hope to ingest is declining exponentially and so we benefit from greater clarity and higher information density whilst, simultaneously, for whatever reason, reading for pleasure is in decline.

[-]chasmani6mo10

There's the argument that increasing access to information creates competition for attention, which drives language to be more concise and readable, e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-024-00117-1

[-]deepthoughtlife6mo10

Both examples are harder to understand than necessary. Either "The firefighters who'd been sleeping jumped into action when the alarm sounded." or "When the alarm sounded, the firefighters who'd been sleeping jumped into action." seem much more understandable. The actual short version that flows would be "Then sleeping firefighters jumped into action when the alarm sounded."

Long version: The problem I see with the examples of Hypotaxis and Parataxis might be that it is artificially chunking up the ideas involved into separate bits when it is unnecessary, a... (read more)

[-]Dale Larson6mo10

I've always been a sucker for long sentences. This doesn't mean that I'm overly obsessed by them. Even short ones do have their place. I think I prefer them. You might, too.

But a long sentence — one able to rise to the complicated challenge of a new journey — merits clear regard if without sacrificing speed it happily sweeps us along over the last bumpy road toward home, like riding with John Wayne as he pulls into Dodge City, gets down, casually ambles over to get a bourbon, and says, "Howdy, boys. What do y'all do here for fun?" I mean old Texas tumbleweeds really do roll.

[-]Bunthut6mo*10

Sentence lengths have declined.

Data: I looked for similar data on sentence lengths in german, and the first result I found covering a similar timeframe was wikipedia referencing Kurt Möslein: Einige Entwicklungstendenzen in der Syntax der wissenschaftlich-technischen Literatur seit dem Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts. (1974), which does not find the same trend:

Year	wps
1770	24,50
1800	25,54
1850	32,00
1900	23,58
1920	22,72
1940	19,60
1960	19,90

This data on scientific writing starts lower than any of your english examples from that time, and increases initially, but arrives in ... (read more)

[-]JJ Lawrence6mo10

Reading this article made me immediately think about Russian literature, particularly from the 19th century. Mostly because of my background and how I am still working on adopting to English in my speaking and writing. Russian authors of that time are famous for their elaborate, intricate, and syntactically rich sentences. This isn't unique just to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and even Bulgakov later on. The Russian literary tradition is about constructing entire emotional and philosophical worlds within a single sentence where thoughts cascade into one ... (read more)

[-]drgunn6mo10

A useful direction for further research would be to analyze fiction and non-fiction as separate corpora. Longer sentences may reflect a tendency towards hypotaxis, and they may also be a deliberate stylistic choice for fiction writers, perhaps setting a more languid and relaxed tone not appropriate for much non-fiction.

[-]muggleschoolbus6mo10

I think the point about the Internet enabling a "wordier style" due to lower printing costs actually gets things backwards.

What actually matters is the competition for attention. Consider that as the barrier to entry to publishing has dropped, the number of suppliers has exploded, while the number of consumers has grown much more slowly. That means there's far more supply competing for limited attention. This creates enormous selection pressure for ideas to be consumable, instantly engaging, and spreadable.

I think eloquence and beautiful language rightfull... (read more)

[-]Scott Burson6mo10

Having had my writing criticized for decades on account of an allegedly overly hypotactic style, with parentheticals and qualifiers inserted freely, sometimes to multiple levels, I think it's safe to say I am attempting to reverse this trend single-handedly.

[-]Purplehermann7mo10

Pros: less to hold in your head at once, letting you focus on the content rather than keeping the words straight. (The longer the worse, and using different languages also makes this harder)

Cons: writers have less stylistic space in less words

Sentences should be shorter rather than longer, expcept where there is good reason (keeping out the less intelligent or for stylistic reasons)

[-]Alex K. Chen (parrot)7mo10

Related https://www.econlib.org/archives/2008/10/where_is_the_po.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com

[-]A_Raybould6mo-10

This is an interesting question and you have made many pertinent points, but it remains unclear to me why a move from listening to silent reading creates selective pressure for styles that can be received and understood quickly. If that is an advantage in silent reading, why less so for the same words spoken? After all, listening seems to be burdened with a few additional barriers to comprehension, such as in disambiguating homophones and the inability to skip backwards and re-hear what was just said.

The preference for brevity in telegraphy and newspapers ... (read more)

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