Not easy reading: how humanities texts are becoming more difficult to read. From the article:

Research has become harder to read, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Though authors may argue that their work is written for expert audiences, much of the general public suspects that some academics use gobbledygook to disguise the fact that they have nothing useful to say. The trend towards more opaque prose hardly allays this suspicion….

To track academic writing over time, The Economist analysed 347,000 abstracts published between 1812 and 2023. The dataset was produced by the British Library and represents a majority of English-language doctoral theses awarded by British universities. We reviewed each ab- stract using the Flesch reading-ease test, which measures sentence and word length to gauge readability.

From “asymmetric allylation of aldehydes” to “pneumatological and apocalyptically eschatological foundations”, abstracts had an unmistakably scholarly aroma. We found that, in every discipline, the abstracts have become harder to read over the past 80 years. The shift is most stark in the humanities and social sciences, with average Flesch scores falling from around 37 in the 1940s to 18 in the 2020s. From the 1990s onwards, those fields went from being substantially more readable than the natural sciences—as you might expect—to as complicated.

For other posts on reading, see here.

For other posts on writing, see here.