English prose styles change through time like musical or artistic styles, but within the period of a dominant style people often don’t see it as changeable—they think the current style is simply correct.
I believe a period’s favored writing style can reveal something about how people thought. And that’s true for today’s ‘correct’ prose, too.
Almost anyone can appreciate how Shakespeare’s plays are different from today’s drama. The dimensionality of his characters demonstrates that natural writing isn’t necessary to portray reality. No one talks that way—and yet we believe.
In the early to middle nineteenth century, great prose writers used long, flowing sentences that required concentration from the reader. In their hands, the novel reached a level that would not be exceeded, by authors such as Jane Austen and George Eliot.
Prose style, like decorative style, grew in intricacy through that century, becoming sometimes impenetrably showy and circuitous in the late Victorian era. Henry James mastered extreme subtlety and indirectness with a dizzying style that could, at best, mimic the way internal thoughts coagulate in the mind, so that his ideas would seem to appear on their own.
Modernists responding to World War I, epitomized by Ernest Hemmingway, stripped away all that verbal shrubbery. By the 1950s, the simple declarative sentence had become the only correct kind.
That prose style is as recognizable as mid-century modern furniture, with its simple lines and square corners. Male writers of the era often copied Hemmingway’s bluntness, usually without his grace; women tended to add a bit of irony or sly humor to the short sentences.
Two traditions emerged from the experimentation of the 1960s and 1970s. John Updike’s precise and evocative prose is a model for many MFA students, who unfortunately lack readers. The unkempt New Journalism of writers such as Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese informs much more contemporary writing.
The worst of this work, in a style developed by college newspapers and underground weeklies, had a sloppy, self-indulgent tone. You would wade through long, fuzzy personal observations to learn the point of an article, if you ever got there.
Casual writing has since spread like sweat suits on discount airlines. Combining that informality with the demands of writing for the internet—trying to reach people in only a few seconds, before they scroll—helps define today’s ‘correct’ prose. It is largely flavorless.
The trend extends to non-fiction books, not just blogs. Writers and editors have dumbed down serious books for general readers, while insisting on an often-fake personal presence in the prose. You can see this trend even in works of single authors over the last thirty years.
Many contemporary readers probably wouldn’t understand Henry James or George Eliot. And as writers, we must be understood.
But easy games ultimately are not worth playing. The reward of using the full palette of literary colors and textures demands some formality—just as tennis requires having a net and boundary lines.
As a coach and editor of long-form work, I don’t dumb down. I believe we need to be able to think.
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