Every time we write and read more tweets, WhatsApp messages, Facebook statuses and other texts that are published on platforms that, either explicitly or implicitly, penalize sentences that are too long and complex , punctuated by subordinates, or with unusual adjectives. Even some SEO guidelines (the set of actions aimed at improving the positioning of a website in the results list of Google and other search engines) propose the use of common vocabulary, shorter and more direct titles, etc.
All these underlying rules in the internet environment could be affecting the very way in which the authors of books that are currently being published express themselves.
It is not such a strange effect if we consider that the same invention of the typewriter also influenced the literary style of many of the authors who adopted it, being able to differentiate a pre-machine and a post-machine style . The prose of the philosopher Friederich Nietzsche is an example of this, as Nicholas Carr explains in his book Superficial : “It had become stricter, more telegraphic. It also had a new forcefulness, as if the power of the machine (its ‘iron’), by virtue of some mysterious metaphysical mechanism, was transmitted to the printed words on the page ”.
TS Eliot had a similar experience when he went from handwriting his essays and poems to typing them: “I feel like I’m moving all the long sentences in which I used to recreate myself to a staccato as cutting edge as modern French prose. The typewriter will promote lucidity, but I’m not sure it will do the same with subtlety. “
Long sentences
The typical sentences that Marcel Proust wrote in his work In Search of Lost Time could have 150 to 300 words. In fact, it is said that the longest sentence in the history of literature can be found in his novels. It is something that also happens with the works of Herman Melville and many other authors.
This style, however, is diametrically opposed to the telegraphic one that the internet requires, especially on platforms such as Twitter, which limits a tweet not to a number of words, but even characters.
Authors are also consumers of the internet, and many of them write on Twitter too, so this could have led to more and more authors fleeing from Proust’s overloaded style and embracing the telegraphic style of Twitter with more interest .
It is an effect that the researcher Jeanne Chall already verified was happening in students, who analyzed the grammatical structure of novels by renowned authors of the early 20th century and compared it with that of contemporary works. In addition to differences in style and content, the average sentence length was significantly shorter. He also generally found a more limited use of syntactic complexity and figurative language.
Communication theorist Marshall McLuhan already postulated that the different media in which we read and write influence how we carry out these activities. And, like a fish that bites its tail, if reading on the screen prevents more sustained and calmer concentration than reading on paper, it is natural that this tendency ends up also permeating reading on paper, an activity in frank decline.
We are getting used to reading and writing short, and that will have consequences yet to be studied in our way of thinking and processing information. Although, given that voice recognition systems are more and more accurate and that dictating messages to your phone is (at least) three times faster than writing them, perhaps very soon we will have to start to face new, even stranger changes.
