Journalists and Novelists: A Study of Diverging Styles

Abstract

Readability of news stories sampled for each year for more than a century, from 1885 to 1989, from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times reveals a gradual drop in readability, mainly due to journalistic use of longer words but not to the use of longer sentences. A matched sample of sentences from novels published in the same years show an increase in readability, mainly because novelists used even shorter sentences and continued to use simple words.