I am someone who loves long, complex sentences. The 19th century was peak prose style for me. The Gettysburg Address is a fantastic bit of writing. The fiction of that time can be a joy.
But this style is hard to do well. The Emily Post example given above is readable, though not unusually inspired. It moves through a series of examples and exceptions in a faintly herky-jerky way. But the prose is well-enough fit to Emily Post’s goal. She is trying to introduce many of her readers to the manners of a different social class, and her choice of vocabulary and syntax are part of that. Her readers wish to appear refined, and thus, some fancy words will please them.
Contrast this with Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la Démocratie en Amérique from 1835. This is often considered an unusually good example of aristiocratic prose, at least among the sort of people who write academic introductions:
Parmi les objets nouveaux qui, pendant mon séjour aux États-Unis, ont attiré mon attention, aucun n’a plus vivement frappé mes regards que l’égalité des conditions. Je découvris sans peine l’influence prodigieuse qu’exerce ce premier fait sur la marche de la société ; il donne à l’esprit public une certaine direction, un certain tour aux lois ; aux gouvernants des maximes nouvelles, et des habitudes particulières aux gouvernés.
Bientôt je reconnus que ce même fait étend son influence fort au-delà des mœurs politiques et des lois, et qu’il n’obtient pas moins d’empire sur la société civile que sur le gouvernement : il crée des opinions, fait naître des sentiments, suggère des usages et modifie tout ce qu’il ne produit pas.
Ainsi donc, à mesure que j’étudiais la société américaine, je voyais de plus en plus, dans l’égalité des conditions, le fait générateur dont chaque fait particulier semblait descendre, et je le retrouvais sans cesse devant moi comme un point central où toutes mes observations venaient aboutir.
If you don’t read French, look at the length of the sentences and the punctuation. There is a great degree of parallelism here, and a pleasing rhythm. You could, if you wished to be overly cute about it, reformat much of this writing as a series of bulleted lists. But if you diagrammed the sentences, the structure would be quite clean. Tocqueville is a masterful writer, and here he wishes to convey two things: his own impeccable elite credentials, and his sincere enthusiasm for the egalitarian nature of American society. His goal is to maximize genuine reform in France, while minimizing elite decapitations. This is a subject of immediate interest to his readers.
But for every Alexis de Tocqueville, I could find you a hundred or a thousand writers who wrote needlessly convoluted slop. Long sentences are hard to do well. They demand an almost clockwork precision to remain truly clear.
Today, 19th-century prose is out of fashion. Multiple factors drove this change, including the influence of writers like Hemingway, a frustration with hopelessly convoluted prose, and a growing impatience on the part of readers drowning in oceans of text. And, yes, a vast increase in the portion of the population with a college education. And of course we explain the basics more than we did, because we are increasingly conscious of a broad audience with many odd gaps in their knowledge. Every skipped step risks losing a reader who might have benefited from an author’s thoughts. And some of our readers may even speak English as a second or third language. Even if they are extremely well educated in their native tongue, they may not realize that the “anthropology” department teaches very different things in the US than it does in Europe.
The modern style can be done well, though doing it truly well still demands considerable skill. Perhaps more interestingly, the modern style usually fails more gracefully. Simple sentences and bulleted lists usually succeed in conveying the author’s main points, even if the author is a mediocre writer.
And, yes, a vast increase in the portion of the population with a college education. And of course we explain the basics more than we did, because we are increasingly conscious of a broad audience with many odd gaps in their knowledge. Every skipped step risks losing a reader who might have benefited from an author’s thoughts. And some of our readers may even speak English as a second or third language.
If this is true, I wonder if the advent of AI will lead to prose in books that doesn’t have to do this anymore, because the reader-otherwise-left-behind can just ask AI if they end up confused about something.
I am someone who loves long, complex sentences. The 19th century was peak prose style for me. The Gettysburg Address is a fantastic bit of writing. The fiction of that time can be a joy.
But this style is hard to do well. The Emily Post example given above is readable, though not unusually inspired. It moves through a series of examples and exceptions in a faintly herky-jerky way. But the prose is well-enough fit to Emily Post’s goal. She is trying to introduce many of her readers to the manners of a different social class, and her choice of vocabulary and syntax are part of that. Her readers wish to appear refined, and thus, some fancy words will please them.
Contrast this with Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la Démocratie en Amérique from 1835. This is often considered an unusually good example of aristiocratic prose, at least among the sort of people who write academic introductions:
If you don’t read French, look at the length of the sentences and the punctuation. There is a great degree of parallelism here, and a pleasing rhythm. You could, if you wished to be overly cute about it, reformat much of this writing as a series of bulleted lists. But if you diagrammed the sentences, the structure would be quite clean. Tocqueville is a masterful writer, and here he wishes to convey two things: his own impeccable elite credentials, and his sincere enthusiasm for the egalitarian nature of American society. His goal is to maximize genuine reform in France, while minimizing elite decapitations. This is a subject of immediate interest to his readers.
But for every Alexis de Tocqueville, I could find you a hundred or a thousand writers who wrote needlessly convoluted slop. Long sentences are hard to do well. They demand an almost clockwork precision to remain truly clear.
Today, 19th-century prose is out of fashion. Multiple factors drove this change, including the influence of writers like Hemingway, a frustration with hopelessly convoluted prose, and a growing impatience on the part of readers drowning in oceans of text. And, yes, a vast increase in the portion of the population with a college education. And of course we explain the basics more than we did, because we are increasingly conscious of a broad audience with many odd gaps in their knowledge. Every skipped step risks losing a reader who might have benefited from an author’s thoughts. And some of our readers may even speak English as a second or third language. Even if they are extremely well educated in their native tongue, they may not realize that the “anthropology” department teaches very different things in the US than it does in Europe.
The modern style can be done well, though doing it truly well still demands considerable skill. Perhaps more interestingly, the modern style usually fails more gracefully. Simple sentences and bulleted lists usually succeed in conveying the author’s main points, even if the author is a mediocre writer.
If this is true, I wonder if the advent of AI will lead to prose in books that doesn’t have to do this anymore, because the reader-otherwise-left-behind can just ask AI if they end up confused about something.