While I appreciate the sentiment in favor of the long-winded and lovers of complex sentence structure...
People have been saying for many years that “this generation”, whatever this generation is, is dumber than previous ones. This actually isn’t true. The complexity of our lives has increased dramatically, and studies have shown something called the Flynn Effect, where they need to keep recalibrating the IQ scale to make sure that 100 stays 100 and doesn’t drift up. (100 is the average IQ. If the average IQ starts being 105, then you have to redo the scale so that what was 105 on the old scale is 100 now.) In other words, our IQ is increasing over time, not decreasing.
I believe the reason most people prefer short, pithy sentences is information overload. In the 1800′s, there was a lot less to read, and very little else to occupy one’s attention aside from conversation, and you could only converse with people directly in front of you. Now, we can have voice conversations with people around the world, we can have many text conversations going on at once, we can watch video, we can listen to audio, and we can read posts... all at the same time. People nowadays are drowning in information, so they want what they take in to be short and to the point.
In the 90′s, at my first office job, I learned the concept of the “executive summary.” The busy corporate executive doesn’t have time to read the 80-page proposal; they need a 1 or 2 sheet summary that tells them everything they need to know. (Then the 80 pages back it up with enough detail that his assistants can read it and feel confident that the exec summary was accurate.) People who want the information to be boiled down into something short and snappy aren’t necessarily people who can’t comprehend something more long-winded... they could be people who are drowning in enormous piles of information they need to process, constantly. And while in the 90′s it was mostly the CEO of a company who had that problem, today it’s almost everyone.
This puts those of us who have a great deal of information to convey, and the desire to cover every detail of it, at a disadvantage. I feel as if, if a person has said something inflammatory, and I reply in detail to tell them why they’re wrong, and they mock me for my lengthy reply and don’t respond to my arguments... then they’re advertising that they’re too stupid to have an argument with. If you want to box with sharks, maybe you should get out of the kiddie pool. Don’t say things on the internet to start arguments if you’re not able to read and properly respond.
But, if I just want to come out onto the internet and explain something, apropos of nothing... then it really is up to me to provide something pithy as a summary of what I’m saying, so the people suffering from information overload can grasp my point, and maybe then choose to read in more detail.
People nowadays aren’t dumb. Probably smarter than previous gens.
The Internet means information overload is a thing. A very common thing.
People want it short and sweet because they’re getting too much information, so each individual source has to be short and digestible or they’ll tune it out.
Grammar rules from the 1800′s when no one had anything better to do than read don’t work so well under information overload.
Executive summaries that make your long detailed statement short and pithy are a good idea.
Doesn’t mean I’m going to stop with the long-winded sentences and wall’o’text posts anytime soon, but it does mean I understand why that may reduce my audience.
stormborns
annaxmalina
baratheonpilled
ellievsbear
kaledo-art
discoholicmusic
