Are early books more complex than more recent book,today?

Answer 1

Yes.. The earlier works are always the best

Answer 2

I believe earlier books are more complex. I think authors long ago wrote for the sheer joy of writing. Most did not recieve any kind of income for thier books, and many did not even have them published before they died. I think people today (not all, of course) just slap a book together for the almighty dollar without putting much thought into it. I do not believe, however, that a books complexity has anything to do with the language it was written in, earlier books may be more difficult for us to read, but that was how they commonly talked back then.

Answer 3

Until recent times books, like many things we consider ordinary today, were luxuries and were mostly reserved for the upper/educated class. When things become available to all the average quality declines, but the best of today's products are as good as what was produced in the past. This applies to books also. There are a lot of complex books today, probably more than in the past because we know more now, but they are they are mixed with the simple and many are considered too technical to read.

Answer 4

If you are talking about text books, that is certainly a fact. The average reading level in colleges and universities has dropped significantly, and thus the reading level, and material presentation, have been watered down to appeal to what is coming out of high schools today.

When I was selling text books to universities in NYC, I sold a book published for a high school civics class to New York University because their students could not read anything. Consider, now, that NYU is a private university offering all sorts of powerful degrees, yet their students could not read.

Projects like we have here in Georgia with the HOPE Scholarship, which has now been duplicated by many other states, give students with a B average free tuition to a Georgia State university. What tht has resulted in is grade inflation and students who can't read their driver's license are now attending college. The universities in Georgia also inflate the grades to keep the state revenues coming in, so the student graduates basically with no real education.

In Georgia, they are constantly dropping courses from the curriculum like history and foreign languages, one of the courses requires a lot of reading and the other teaches you language skills that will assist you in vocabulary development and the basics of learning English also.

When I graduated university with a degree in History and a stated minor in Journalism, the reading level for newspapers was at 8th grade. That was 40 years ago, I guess you can say it has dropped.

If you are talking about novels and non-fiction non-text books, the situation now is that every one in the world is a writer if they have a word processor. So you end up with a plethora of stupid novels written to an audience of white middle class housewives.

None of these books will ever end up in the classics list, they are all throw away.

As for present day students reading, they basically don't. They seem to think that they can get all of their information from the net or that they can get answers from others, rather than looking them up and researching them, on venues like Yahoo Answer. Frankly, I think that is pathetic. Students on the whole today are basically illiterate.

I can answer 95% of the questions asked by students in the History category. Stupid enough, History is under humanities when it is a social science. Even Yahoo does not know! I answer on a few. If I decide that a question is legitimate and that finding a correct answer would be close to impossible to the illiterate, I may answer it, but part of my answer will be to refer them to a book that will have the sought after information in it. Basically, I don't do homework for people.

Such venues did not exist when I was in high school, so we spent our time in the public library researching what we needed. However in the county that I live in, you can't research anything because they play to the audience of frustrated middle class housewives and keep all of the current, senseless, novels on the shelves rather than to have things on the shelves where the student can research it without a stupid computer.

Answer 5

I think in earlier days- pre television and radio - the authors used to describe everything in the room. Nowadays they would just say "he walked into the lounge".

whereas in olden times they would describe every stick of furniture in the room, plus the curtains etc.

Attention spans are much shorter nowadays, thanks to the internet. I have a theory that any book written more than about 100 years ago,is pretty much unreadable.

Answer 6

Yes tehy are. If you look at a copy of a book made awhile back such as the works of charles dickens they have are a lot more wordy and have larger words that we don't use in out vocabulary today.

Answer 7

to most people today they are but that was the way things were written then. the use of language was much different and so the people of that time knew how to read it. to them i imagine no they werent. what would the do with some of our books today? the language we use may not make sense to them.

Answer 8

the language made them more complex.