Why do modern day people prefer simple writing?

Question

Viewing time in reverse, we see that each generation prefers more complex writing than the previous one, and viewing time in the normal direction, we see that, with each generation, people’s tolerance for complex writing has decreased, the present day giving us style guides that recommend simplicity, and the agreement of many with this recommendation. Why does it seem that, in this generation, people prefer such simple writing? And am I wrong about the complexity of writing increasing from the present day through the past?

Answer 1

The assumption that "people's tolerance for complex writing has decreased" is wrong. The (complex) texts that we today consider classics and admire for their refinement weren't read by the broad masses. In fact, most people in the past couldn't read at all and what we today consider the literature of the past was a pastime for the elite. Narratives for the general population (such as the ballads sung by itinerant bards in the Middle Ages) have always been comparably simple and straightforward both in language and plot.

If, for example, you look at the most popular books of the 19th century, you will quickly notice that their language is actually identical in simplicity and style to the popular fiction of today. The Mysteries of London by G. M. W. Reynolds, “the most published man of the 19th century” and “the most popular writer of his time”, begins like this:

OUR narrative opens at the commencement of July, 1831.

The night was dark and stormy. The sun had set behind huge piles of dingy purple clouds, which, after losing the golden hue with which they were for awhile tinged, became sombre and menacing. The blue portions of the sky that here and there had appeared before the sunset, were now rapidly covered over with those murky clouds which are the hiding-places of the storm, and which seemed to roll themselves together in dense and compact masses, ere they commenced the elemental war.

In the same manner do the earthly squadrons of cavalry and mighty columns of infantry form themselves into one collected armament, that the power of their onslaught may be the more terrific and irresistible.

That canopy of dark and threatening clouds was formed over London; and a stifling heat, which there was not a breath of wind to allay or mitigate, pervaded the streets of the great metropolis.

Everything portended an awful storm.

In the palace of the peer and the hovel of the artisan the windows were thrown up; and at many, both men and women stood to contemplate the scene - timid children crowding behind them.

The heat became more and more oppressive.

At, length large drops of rain fell, at intervals of two or three inches apart, upon the pavement.

And then a flash of lightning, like the forked tongue of one of those fiery serpents of which we read in oriental tales of magic and enchantment, darted forth from the black clouds overhead.

Apart from some old-fashioned words and phrases, this reads like any pulp fiction today.

Answer 2

Technology.

There is just an overabundance of entertaining things to read and see, and we have become accustomed by TV and Movies and Talk Shows and phone memes to getting ever-quicker hits. More content, more humor, more drama packed into fewer minutes. What used to take paragraphs to describe can be captured in a second or two of video.

Quicker laughs or drama out-competes slow and leisurely stories.

That's it.

Our expectations have changed. Actors are good, writers are good.

Moby Dick, considered a classic, could not be published today, the long (very long) elucidation of whale hunting and ship life would be rejected by every agent and editor on the planet.

We have mechanized the plot points of movies; the turning points occur within a page of where they are expected, the length must be within about 5 pages of what is expected, or it won't be bought. When considering screenplays, readers (and executives) turn to precise pages and expect "beats" to occur there, or within a page or two -- otherwise the screenplay is not suited for production.

(Unless by an award winning writer, of course.)

The same with books; hit your marks or don't get published.

To a large extent, the same thing is true of music: There is a form. A few famous names may get away with variations. (The Beatles and "Hey Jude" come to mind.) But for the most part, if you want to sell tunes you must be creative and follow the formula.

I am not saying this is terrible! Just like the 3-Act Structure was originally devised by studying existing stories that gained popularity, the more mechanized version of it in scripts is derived from blockbuster movies; this is what sells, this is what modern viewers want to see. Imagination and surprises still count, they just need to be in the expected form.

The same is true for stories. Imagination and surprise are still golden; but they must fit the form that sells best.

The advance of technology and myriad outlets for stories has made paying consumers connoisseurs of the art; authors must be creative but also meet the modern expectations for pacing and structure.

Somebody famous like Stephen King might get away with veering off the beaten path; he has enough fans that will buy anything he writes.

But for the most part, it is no longer the leisurely world it once was, when people that could afford to read for entertainment had all the time in the world to kill, and there just wasn't literally hundreds of choices competing for their attention.

Competition and easy access has pressured writers to streamline their work and deliver more imagination and drama per page.

Answer 3

Style guides for factual information recommend simplicity because it makes the final result easier to understand.

At least when talking about non-fiction, making the writing simple is a virtue because it makes things easier to understand.

Most non-fiction is written with one of two primary goals: Either to educate and inform the reader or to persuade the reader on some topic. To be clear, a single piece of non-fiction may in fact be chasing many goals at the same time. Even non-fiction often wants to entertain, or at least avoid being boring. Commercially published non-fiction wants to be sold. Informing and persuading are often intertwined at least to a degree.

But with all of those caveats, most non-fiction is written with the primary goal of either informing or persuading the reader. The easier it is for the reader to understand, the more successful it is likely to be at either informing or persuading.

As a tangent, though a related one. Writing simply and making things easy to read is often harder. It requires greater organization (at least in the final draft. The first draft can be a disorganized mess). It requires looking for simpler words while ensuring that they still convey the right meaning. It requires breaking down complex topics. It also requires minimizing jargon and providing explanations for the jargon when necessary.

At least when dealing with a complex topic, it is often easier to write something dense and hard to understand than it is to make that topic understandable. But making it understandable is a virtue as it makes it much more likely to convey the full information.

Answer 4

This trend is not restricted to just books, and it isn't an effect that is so slow as to take generations to manifest.

Look at popular YouTube videos now vs. those from 2020, or 2015, or 2010. These days, a significant fraction of popular videos are either short (<30m long) or even within YouTube Shorts, where videos are typically less than a minute long, whereas in the recent past they were 30:00 or even 45:00, with few creators still making long-form videos like that. Additionally, for many YouTubers, content has gradually approached some Platonic ideal of the same few ideas with slightly-different names and textures, especially among gamers, which is increasingly entertaining to those with short attention spans and little interest in anything new.

Look at newspapers now vs. those from 2000 or 1975. Before the Internet, you had to pick up a piece of paper and read text for a significant amount of time, because a lot of news had to fit onto one piece of paper for the paper to be worth it. Articles would sometimes be several pages long, in very small print. Now, with the Internet where you can post enormous volumes of work instantly, articles are considerably shorter and grouped together by topic online.

Look at novels, where once scenes were so detailed and intricate that they would often take half a page or more to set up, before any dialogue or action takes place, and where now a scene is set with a few words and shown rather than told so that the reader can imagine it as they like without too much restriction.

These are all just properties of the same trend: people changing. Consumers of YouTube videos today want less complexity and more funny bloopers in short clips; consumers of newspapers today want more short articles that can be consumed quickly and in great volume; consumers of novels today want more showing of scenes and less telling (and thus often less writing total). That's not necessarily new.

I (nor any reasonable person) will never claim to be able to completely-explain or predict the future behavior of this trend, but it is evident.

Answer 5

Efficiency.

2-3 millennia ago, writing was a rare skill and media was scarce. Outside of Alexandria, most readers only had a few texts. Complex language can keep re-reading enjoyable when the plot is memorized.

Internet provides a million lifetimes of reading material freely. The new figure of merit is value per word.
Intentionally terse.

Answer 6

I think that “each generation prefers more complex writing than the previous one” would need some justification.  Certainly, older writing seems more complex to present-day eyes — but I think a good part of that is subjective, due more to lack of familiarity more than any inherent difference of complexity.

The language that we English-speakers learned is (more-or-less) current Modern English, which has small but significant differences in vocabulary, grammar, and syntax from 19th-Century English; and those differences increase the further you go back.

To take an extreme case, most of us would find Middle English (Chaucer &c) very hard to read, even if we had studied and learned it, because that's not our native language.  But someone of Chaucer's time would probably find early-21st-Century Modern English similarly complex and hard to follow!

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This is true of the long-term development of languages, too.  For example, to modern-day eyes Latin with its complex cases and conjugations seems far more complex than any modern language — and yet people of the time learned, spoke, and wrote it fluently without trouble.  In many ways, Latin is not more complex overall — it's just that the complexity is expressed differently from how it is in modern languages, and so while the aspects that are more complex are very obvious to us, we don't recognise the simpler ones.

I'd thoroughly recommend a book which addresses this far better than I can: The Unfolding Of Language by Guy Deutscher.  I'm no language scholar, but although the book goes deeply into the technical details, I found it easy to read, clear, lucid, and absolutely fascinating.

Answer 7

This question enlightens me to think "1. what's writing?" Wikipedia tells us that writing is the act of creating a persistent representation of human language. I understand writing as a way to convey human information, which is vulnerable (e.g. those dead languages and symbols) and meanwhile extremely-creative (so many genres).

"2. what's writing for?" writing is able to carry all information about human. Except that we cannot meet physical (persons, human being, human culture), we can learn about them through their writing in a almost thorough way. Writing is also documenting every information about ourself. So, if the writing is about the tech which make our life convenient or about the culture which builds the current society, such kind of writing is by no means "simple", because it's related to the core happiness and dignity of human being. But when it comes to entertainment, which admittedly is also an important part of human life, writing do become "simpler" nowadays compared with even 5 years ago.

My most intuitive feelings about kids these days (e.g. my neighbor's child, my friend's child...) is that they are swamped by data filtered by algorithm with the objective not related to the truly-concerned about them. This phenomenon not only happens to the books they read, the music they listened to, the video they watched, even the daily language they used, become "simpler" and entertainment-dense. I'm worried about my own kids rotten by the fragmentized / entertainment-dense information, from which I did find relaxation after laborious work.

The next question may be "3. If I am addictive to 'simple writing', what can I do?" My answer is focusing on the purpose of writing. To relax, I require the simple thing to some extent. But when it comes to critical thinking/discussion/..., I hope I am still able to convey information by writing/speaking/... in a "non-simple" way. I hope I am capable to appreciate the beauty of the Hamlet soliloquy, for example.