Flesch-Kincaid. Damn autocorrect. That’s another thing that’s ruining English. Man, the gall of the people who code these phone keyboards.
My keyboard just autocorrected gall to fall and I had to force it to use gall.
They autocorrect words that are already correct, to homogenize them into what the algorithm “thinks” is a more common sentence structure. This wouldn’t be a problem if people just used phone keyboards to piddle around and chat, but an increasing number of authors—YA authors especially, who embrace every silly new tech trend—are writing entire novels on their phones.
No de Sade for me, sadly. I read the entire Lensman series and Ringworld around that age.
When you go back to the likes of E.E. “Doc” Smith, Heinlein, Asimov, Niven, Pournelle, Stanislaw Lem, and so on, and you compare them to what passes for writing nowadays, a rather striking pattern emerges. Newer books have a very simplistic vocabulary, as if someone has plucked the words out of our language and replaced them with a form of dumbed-down newspeak.
When Isaac Asimov came to the US, he was illiterate in English and had no money. He went on to write Foundation. Many of today’s authors wouldn’t be able to write Foundation if you beat them over the head with Webster’s dictionary. What happened?
