| Yes, although sentences tend to be shorter in the contemporary period, they waste more words overall. This is partly because we tend to compare classic authors to mediocre contemporaries, but that is not all of it. A lot of it is that the standard has become academic authors who are dreadfully verbose, rather than classic essayists who are elegant and eloquent, such as Samuel Johnson, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Charles Lamb, Thomas de Quincy, John Henry Cardinal Newman, George Bernard Shaw, William Hazlitt, Thomas Huxley, G.K. Chesterton, and others....... |
