Many years ago, in a bout of enthusiasm, I read several classic novels. I coped all right with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Bram Stoker's Dracula (both written in the 19th Century), but I found both James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (both written in the 17th Century) to be heavy going. It was the language, and adjusting to the unusual turn of phrase was a challenge. In more recent times, I have had occasion to read parts of some of the classics in economics, including bits of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. I found that when I stray from the parts of the book that are already well known to me, it is quite taxing to read.
The challenge in these cases is the language. It is a truism that language has changed over time, and those brought up on contemporary writing can find it challenging (as I do) to read things that were written well before their time. Is that because more recent writing is easier to read in terms of word use, or because the structure, turns of phrase, and writing styles are more familiar? Based on my experiences, I suspect the latter (although I'm not convinced that they are genuinely separable, and of course there could be many other factors at play). Some mild support of my suspicions is available in this recent article by Ju Wen (Chongqing University) and Lei Lei (Shanghai International Studies University), published in the journal Scientometrics (sorry, I don't see an ungated version online). Wen and Lei look at the rate of use of adjectives and adverbs in the abstracts of journal articles published in general, biomedical and life sciences over the period from 1969 to 2019 (over 775,000 abstracts are included). They reason that, based on past research:
...adjectives and adverbs cluttered scientific writing and made scientific papers less readable...
So, greater use of adjectives and adverbs would suggest that abstracts have become less readable over time. Wen and Lei find:
...an upward trend in the use of adjectives and adverbs in scientific writing, that is, researchers used an increasing number of adjectives and adverbs in reporting their scientific findings.
And interestingly:
...the use of emotion adjectives and adverbs demonstrated a similar upward trajectory while those of the nonemotion adjectives and adverbs did not.
Of course, their analysis is mostly descriptive and doesn't actually demonstrate reduced readability, and neither does it identify why it is that the language used in abstracts has changed over time. Wen and Lei offer a couple of speculations:
To get their works published in academic journals, scientific writers may resort to linguistic devices such as emotion words (adjectives and adverbs in our case) to make their articles more positive and seemingly more appealing to editors and reviewers...
The structured abstracts usually follow an Introduction-Method-Results-Discussion format which requires the writers to summarize precisely the core information of their manuscript within a limited number of words. In such conditions, writers may become increasingly dependent on the use of adjectives and adverbs to highlight their stance and evaluation... in the study. Hence, the use of adjectives and adverbs helps writers make compelling arguments and helps readers remember key points in the full text of an article.
It would take some more detailed work, perhaps making use of exogenous changes in abstract structure or changes in editorial teams, to tease out whether either of those mechanisms explains the underlying changes. Nevertheless, if we take these results at face value, they do suggest that academic writing (at least in the sciences) is not becoming easier to read over time. So, perhaps I should persevere with the economics classics, for some time yet.
[HT: Marginal Revolution]
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