Changes in writing styles

Mrs ERJ belongs to a "Book Club". They are all "ladies" in the finest sense of the word.

This month's book was written about 100 years ago and Mrs ERJ commented that the text is much richer in adjectives than "modern" novels.

Having a short window of time, I looked into the matter.

A Master's student in North Macedonia wrote a thesis on the topic. He determined that the text of the book that the fine ladies of Eaton Rapids are studying is only 6% adjectives which is LOWER than most modern fiction (which runs between 6% and 12% of text).

Where the 100 year-old book differs from modern writing is that 57% of the adjectives are unique and only used once in the book and a disproportionate share of them are "compound adjectives". 

Instead of choosing to describe a vehicle as "a yellow car" the author chose to write  "It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns."

There are also dances of adjectives and adverbs that paint scenes in great detail "...fading lamp light slanting across the fluttering muscles in the fair maiden's arms..." kind of thing.

The descriptive language in the old novel is not the stylized, formulistic, and boringly repetitive bridges between action-scenes ala Marvel comic books. Those action-bridges are as invisible to the reader and as forgettable as "...he said..." in dialogue. The descriptive language in the 100 year-old novel is more like a series of meticulously composed sets in a movie where Chekhov's Gun guides the reader as he anticipates future events.

Survivor bias

There was a lot of dreck written in that era. The "nickel" cowboy novels are examples of that. Writers who had never been west of the Hudson river churned out vast numbers of novels that have since been forgotten. The few examples of that genre that are still available were written by authors who had actually been cowboys or who had spent time "out west" as hunters.

Stepping back a few paces, I have to wonder if our current style of frenetic action will look dated to future readers. Fashions change. The pendulum swings.