Novels Are Getting Simpler. So What?
All right. Let's talk about this.
A recent study, covered by El Cultural, reveals that the average number of words per sentence in novels has declined considerably over the last century. Contemporary fiction uses shorter sentences. Paragraphs are leaner. Syntactic subordination is in retreat.
The predictable response is cultural panic: we are losing complexity, attention is fragmenting, social media is destroying prose. But hold on. Let's think for a moment before getting nostalgic.
First: did Borges write long sentences? Sometimes. Did Carver? Barely. Sentence length is not an indicator of depth or its absence. A sentence can be short and contain a world.
Second: syntactic simplification is not the same as conceptual simplification. There are contemporary writers who use short sentences to convey impossibly complex ideas.
Third, and this is the real question: what kind of simplicity are we measuring? The kind that comes from clarity — that difficult, precious thing that Borges and Chekhov pursued — or the kind that comes from creative exhaustion? No study can measure that.
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