“In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elms trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.”
— 107-word sentence from Stuart Little (1945)

Sentence lengths have declined. The average sentence length was 49 for Chaucer (died 1400), 50 for Spenser (died 1599), 42 for Austen (died 1817), 20 for Dickens (died 1870), 21 for Emerson (died 1882), 14 [...]

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First published:
April 3rd, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xYn3CKir4bTMzY5eb/why-have-sentence-lengths-decreased

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Graph showing literacy rates for men and women in England (1580-1900)

Two line graphs comparing sentence lengths in presidential addresses (1800-2000).

This image shows comparison graphs tracking the mean sentence length in both Inaugural Addresses and State of the Union speeches from approximately 1800 to 2000, with both showing downward trends over time.

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“Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?” by Arjun Panickssery

LessWrong (30+ Karma)