English Has Become Easier To Read (worksinprogress.news) 57
The conventional wisdom that English prose has gotten easier to read because sentences have gotten shorter is wrong, according to a new analysis published in Works in Progress by writer and Mercatus Center research fellow Henry Oliver. The real transformation happened centuries ago in the 1500s and 1600s when Bible translators like William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer developed a "plain style" built on logical syntax rather than the older rhythmic, periodic structures inherited from medieval prose.
Oliver argues that much of what modern datasets measure as declining sentence length is actually just changing punctuation habits. Writers now use periods where earlier generations used colons and semicolons. One dataset shows semicolon usage dropped from one every 90 words in 1781 to one every 390 words today. The cognitive complexity of a paragraph often remains the same regardless of how it's punctuated. Even wildly popular modern books don't follow the "short sentences equal readable" formula. Oliver points to Onyx Storm, the 2025 fantasy novel that has sold tens of millions of copies, which opens with sentences of 24 and 30 words. The 30-word sentence has a subordinate clause twice as long as its main clause. The book reads easily not because sentences are short but because the language is plain and the syntax is logical.
Oliver argues that much of what modern datasets measure as declining sentence length is actually just changing punctuation habits. Writers now use periods where earlier generations used colons and semicolons. One dataset shows semicolon usage dropped from one every 90 words in 1781 to one every 390 words today. The cognitive complexity of a paragraph often remains the same regardless of how it's punctuated. Even wildly popular modern books don't follow the "short sentences equal readable" formula. Oliver points to Onyx Storm, the 2025 fantasy novel that has sold tens of millions of copies, which opens with sentences of 24 and 30 words. The 30-word sentence has a subordinate clause twice as long as its main clause. The book reads easily not because sentences are short but because the language is plain and the syntax is logical.
How about no punctuation? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: How about no punctuation? (Score:1)
would be better without capitalisation or quotation marks and maybe add some phonetic spellings into the mix and then get jamming on the auto suggestion and the word is this was a good day and a good night of fun with my family i hope everyone had fun today too i hope everyone had an this was a good day and a good night of fun with my family i hope everyone has an this was a good idea and a good thing i will try this next year as i am very excited about this new product i have made in my life i am excited a
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"You remind me..."
Sure, "me" LOL. As if we haven't seen these same petty insults countless times before.
Re: How about no punctuation? (Score:2)
What youâ(TM)re missing is monospaced text and fixed line lengths that are longer than the mobile view by a few words on their own line and annoyingly too short for a computer display. The holy warriors of the Usenet will then be very happy.
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YOUCOULDEVENUSETHEROMANSTYLEWITHOUTANYSPACES
Fun fact to get past the filter:
Punctuation (including spaces) was first invented to inform how text should be read aloud.
Re: How about no punctuation? (Score:2)
Re: How about no punctuation? (Score:4, Funny)
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You deleted the punctuation but to do it right you need to let all the ideas flow together in a run on stream of consciousness so there is no way to split the ideas apart even when reading it three times as you try to make sense of a meandering paragraph long sentence which is grammatically valid aside from some missing commas to give you a clue where the individual chunks of information are in the unorganized soup of thoughts which might even have a rational point and a period at the end.
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It sounds like it through a German translator was put.
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That reminds me when I interviewed for a start-up that wanted to make any app that could do real-time translation of any language. And suggested that with noise cancelling headphones you wouldn't even notice the person spoke a different language.
And I'm sitting in their interview pitch thinking: that's now how German to English translation works. You often need to get pretty close to the end of the German sentence before you can even begin the English translation.
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Same with Japanese due, with the additional problem that often you need to context to do a sensible translation. Often things like newspaper headlines come out as "I did such and such" because the lack of context means that the software can't tell it's not someone relating their own experience.
A universal translator is basically impossible.
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that you bothered to use uppercase characters in your post indicates you are far more civilized than your typical slashdotter
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According to Gen Z, punctuation is violence.
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The slashdot lameness filter is a road
YOUMESSEDITUPINTHEPA
STLANGUAGESSUCHASLAT
INDIDNTHAVESPACESEIT
paved with good intentions but like all
HERTHESPACESCOUNTASP
UNCTUATIONTOOANDOFCO
URSETHEDISTINCTIONBE
such attempts at prescribing rules it can
TWEENCAPITALSANDLOWE
RCASEDIDNTEXISTEITHE
RBUTVELLUMANDSTONEWA
lead to a special place in hell
SEXPENSIVESOITWASWAS
TEFULTONOTFILLTHEWHO
LESURFACEEFFICIENTLY
FTFY (Score:3)
The conventional wisdom that English prose [became] easier to read because sentences [became] shorter is wrong,
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It done gotten more short-like
Re: FTFY (Score:3)
Reading is for chumps (Score:2)
Just talk to ChatGpt. And listen to the answer. Reading is hard, right kids?
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Heck, don't bother with ChatGPT... just talk to the current US administration.
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Reading is for NERDS
Poetry in Motion (Score:2)
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Knocked that one out of the park.
TL;DR (Score:1)
Victorians? (Score:2)
I'm not sure the victorians could be accused of having used a plain style. Their prose was often more contorted with more unnecessary padding words than shakespear .
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These trends in writing and society do wax and wane. A plain style emerging in the Age of Enlightenment, a period with social movements that valued rationality. A more prosaic style can reemerge in a response to perception that such rationality can be too cold and austere, such as during the Romantic movement.
In our era we see commercial oriented speech dominating all communication. A style that communicates concisely while also misleading the reader. Modern writing styles attempt to engage the most basic n
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the 26 Letters of the English language make reading easier than trying to decipher characters from languages that have hundreds of symbols like Chinese
If your only goal is pronouncing it, sure. But if you already have to learn the word's meaning, the pronunciation is going to be paired with that anyway.
The hundreds of symbols in Chinese are essentially equivalent to prefixes and suffixes from Greek or Latin. They can be combined semantically. But the pronunciation is much more difficult. Korean or Japanese borrow a lot from Japanese but have fewer phonemes. Korean's writing system is arguably simpler than the Latin alphabet because it follows a patte
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when it comes to the alphabet it’s hard to deny that the 26 Letters of the English language make reading easier than trying to decipher characters from languages that have hundreds of symbols like Chinese or even languages like Arabic where letters change depending on their position in the word
English would benefit from adding Eth (Ðð), Thorn (þ), and Wynn (ƿ). /e/ versus it remaining silent.
Perhaps adding OEthel(Œ) and e-acute (Éé) to that list, especially the latter to help identify when to pronounce
In practice I don't anticipate anyone changing the alphabet we use for English because people HATE learning something new, especially if they already put the time in learning the old way. No amount of improvement to efficiency or accessibility is li
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[Measures sentence length in millimeters]
The Three Little Pigs, in old English (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Funny, but a few centuries after Chaucer. The punch line at the end is worth the wait.
Not surprised about semicolons (Score:2)
I rarely use semicolons; decades ago my teachers always used a red pen to replace them with a period and capitalize the next word. I eventually just gave up and complied with their grammar regime.
Re: Not surprised about semicolons (Score:2)
Teachers these days use green pen because itâ(TM)s less confrontational. Youâ(TM)re clearly traumatised! No idea what their problem was, but semicolons are very useful.
Re: Not surprised about semicolons (Score:2)
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Semicolons are the bastard child of commas. Their use is limited and if you don't use them correctly the reader is confused because the phrasing is off.
Unless you know what you're doing, use a comma or a period or better yet, rewrite so you don't get into the position of needing a semicolon.
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I work with Germans, believe me, you will get another understanding of commas (and capital letters). Point is, you need to know what you're doing with any punctuation. There are plenty of situations where a semicolon is more appropriate than a full-stop.
Long sentences (Score:5, Informative)
That is ONE sentence.
But this kind of many-claused style is hardly new. Here is the first sentence from the Gospel of Luke:
Apparently this kind of structure was not uncommon in Greek of the time.
Re:Long sentences (Score:5, Insightful)
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The difference in writing to a serial bus vs a parallel bus.
I would have guessed it was due to ESL speakers (Score:2)
This tracks. (Score:3)
Forasmuch as we're prone to the use of univerbations, contractions, and the occasional metaphor- the utility of our linguistic vehicles and our love of philology is sure to atrophy for our Bonafede learned practitioners, as well as our amateurs and abecedarians. We all find ourselves using shorter and shorter-handed prose in our professional and personal correspondences as a matter of course. Time is money after all. We rarely consider what society as a whole gives up in our linguistic evolutions and transformations in the interest of expediency and efficient communications until it's gone.
This holiday season, many of us will once again marvel at our own sloppiness in script when confronted with the signatures and holiday well wishes of the elders in our lives that have for whatever reason chosen not to employ the automated spellcheckers and grammatical tools most of us have come to rely on. :)
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We all find ourselves using shorter and shorter-handed prose in our professional and personal correspondences as a matter of course. Time is money after all.
It has nothing to do with time and/or money. Shorter sentences are used because the leaders are fucking morons and stare at you vacantly when you attempt to speak in even the most limited erudite manner.
Me speak with leader. Me speak with few words. Leader stare vacantly otherwise. Complicated sentences or words that are not used by a fourth grader are beyond their capability.
To be fair, this is true of the general population as a whole, not merely the leaders... but it does indicate that we are being led b
My bias as a C programmer (Score:5, Insightful)
This article has motivated me to change up my punctuation preferences; you see: we hardly ever use the noble semi-colon; a punctuation that adds a wonderful dramatic pause; while connecting each sentences into a thought-stream; and only once the complete train of thought has been completed; shall we finally terminate with the ignoble full stop.
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This article has motivated me to change up my punctuation preferences; you see: we hardly ever use the noble semi-colon; a punctuation that adds a wonderful dramatic pause; while connecting each sentences into a thought-stream; and only once the complete train of thought has been completed; shall we finally terminate with the ignoble full stop.
I'll just stick to the quarter colon.
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Who still knows the subtle difference between "end;" and "end."?
Re: My bias as a C programmer (Score:2)
A grammar is so much prettier with semicolons as a separators and period as a terminator.
program := "PROGRAM" "NAME" '(' identifier_list ')' ';' block '.' := declaration_part statement_part := "BEGIN" statement_sequence "END" := statement { ';' statement }
block
statement_part
statement_sequence
well not sure I agree with this (Score:1)
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The sky above the park was the color of a cup of tea left out on a garden bench in a rainstorm.
Changing punctuation habits *do* make it easier (Score:2)
The author argues that shorter sentences are just the result of using periods where semicolons or colons used to be used.
Oliver argues that much of what modern datasets measure as declining sentence length is actually just changing punctuation habits. Writers now use periods where earlier generations used colons and semicolons.
But I'd argue that these long sentences, made up of clauses joined by colons or semicolons--*are* harder to read. Using periods instead, forces the author to write sentences that are shorter and more self-contained.
It's like the old quote that "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." Writing thoughts concisely does take more effort, but it results in text that is easie
I always (Score:3)
I have always thought it wise to request that my sentence be shortened. Prison is hell.