This time, though, the anxiety has a number attached.
A recent Economist piece argued that it is not only that people are reading less, but that “the texture of what is being read is changing,” noting that its analysis of hundreds of New York Times bestsellers found that sentences in popular books have become almost a third shorter since the 1930s.
That is the kind of statistic that lands neatly because it seems to confirm something many readers already feel: that popular fiction has become faster, cleaner, more direct and perhaps a little less demanding.
But is this really a story about declining attention spans? Or is it about literary style changing, readership widening, publishing becoming more commercial, and technology altering how we read?
Probably, annoyingly, all of the above.
First, are people actually reading less?
The evidence here is fairly stark, at least in the United States. A 2025 study published in iScience analysed American Time Use Survey data from more than 236,000 people and found that the proportion of Americans reading for pleasure on an average day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023.
That is not a small drift. That is a cultural weather change.
There are similar warning signs in the UK. The National Literacy Trust reported in 2025 that children’s reading enjoyment had fallen to its lowest level in 20 years, with only 32.7% of 8 to 18-year-olds saying they enjoyed reading “very much” or “quite a lot”. Daily reading among children has also fallen sharply since the survey began.
So the backdrop matters. If fewer people are reading regularly and young readers are less accustomed to long-form written attention, it would not be surprising if the books that dominate bestseller lists begin to reflect that.
But we should be careful. “People are reading less” is not the same as “people are getting worse at reading”, and “sentences are shorter” is not the same as “books are worse”.
A short sentence can be lazy. It can also be devastating.
How long has this been happening?
The shortening sentence is not simply a TikTok-era phenomenon. It has been going on for a long time.
One recent essay by Arjun Panickssery looked at declining sentence length in English prose. It floated several overlapping explanations: changing readerships, the shift from oral to silent reading, the possibility that shorter sentences are easier to process, and broader shifts in education and literary taste.
That last point is important. The long 19th-century sentence belonged to a different reading culture. Novels were often read aloud. Education for the literary classes was steeped in Latin and classical rhetoric. Many writers assumed a patient reader, or at least a reader with fewer competing distractions and a higher tolerance for syntactic furniture.
By the 20th century, prose had already begun to tighten. Journalism mattered. Modernism mattered. Hemingway mattered. The hard, clean line became a style in itself. A sentence did not have to unfurl across half a page to be serious. Sometimes it could be clipped, spare, almost brutal.
So when we talk about shorter sentences, we are not only talking about decline. We are talking about a century-long aesthetic shift towards immediacy.
The technology question
It would be too easy to blame the phone and call it a day. Tempting, of course. There it sits, glowing, needy, always ready to offer us a video of a raccoon stealing cat food when we were meant to be reading Hilary Mantel.
Digital life has changed the conditions of attention. We read in fragments: headlines, messages, captions, notifications, comments, summaries, reviews, screenshots of paragraphs we may or may not return to later. That kind of reading is not inherently worthless, but it is different from sinking into a novel for an hour without interruption.
Research on attention and screens is more cautious than the usual “our attention span is now eight seconds” panic. King’s College London has pointed out that the famous eight-second attention span claim is widely believed but misleading. The issue is not that humans have become goldfish. It is that many people feel more distracted, and technology makes it easier to indulge in distraction.
There is also evidence that digital distractions can interfere with learning and reading. A 2025 meta-analysis on digital reading found that attentional interference generally harms reading comprehension, while OECD work has linked digital distraction in classrooms with lower learning outcomes.
So no, the phone has not single-handedly murdered the subordinate clause. But it has changed the environment in which long sentences must now compete.
The publishing question
There is another, less romantic factor: bestseller lists are not neutral measures of literary style. They measure what sells.
The New York Times bestseller list of the 1930s reflected a very different publishing ecosystem from today’s. Contemporary bestseller lists include a much broader mix of commercial fiction, thrillers, romance, celebrity memoir, self-help, fantasy, romantasy, book-club fiction and literary crossover novels.
That matters because different genres use sentences in different ways.
Thrillers often favour short chapters and clean, propulsive prose. Romance often prioritises emotional clarity and pace. Commercial fiction tends to avoid sentences that make readers stop and unpack their grammar with a small torch. None of this makes those books inferior. It simply means the average sentence on a bestseller list may be shaped by market category as much as cultural intelligence.
In other words, the bestseller sentence may be shrinking partly because the bestseller itself has changed.
Is this a style thing?
Yes. And style is never only style.
Shorter sentences can signal speed, intimacy, suspense, plainness, accessibility, realism or emotional control. A contemporary novel often wants to sound close to thought or speech. It wants to move. It wants the reader inside the moment rather than standing outside admiring the architecture.
That is not necessarily a bad thing. Some older prose is gloriously rich. Some of it is also heavy, pompous and in need of a window opening.
Modern prose has given us different pleasures:
- Cleaner intimacy
- Faster pacing
- Sharper dialogue
- More direct interiority
- Less ornamental description
- A stronger sense of voice and immediacy
The danger is not short sentences. The danger is monotony.
A novel made entirely of clipped, frictionless prose can begin to feel strangely weightless. It moves quickly, but nothing catches. The reader glides through, entertained but unmarked. Sometimes, difficulty is not a flaw in prose. Sometimes it is where the depth lives.
Are attention spans falling?
This is the question everyone reaches for, and it deserves a careful answer.
There is decent evidence that people are more distracted, especially in digital environments. There is evidence that reading for pleasure has declined. There is evidence that screen-based distraction can affect comprehension. But the idea of one simple collapsing “attention span” is too crude.
People still binge-watch eight-hour series. They listen to three-hour podcasts. They play enormous games with complex lore. They read thousand-page fantasy novels when the story grips them. Attention has not vanished. It has become more conditional, more contested, and more aggressively competed for.
The real issue may not be that we cannot concentrate. It may be that concentration now needs a stronger reason to defend itself.
A difficult novel used to compete with boredom. Now it competes with everything.
Is the novel radically different from 50 or 100 years ago?
Yes and no, which is the least satisfying but probably the most honest answer.
The novel is absolutely different from what it was 100 years ago. It is more global, more commercial, more diverse in voice and readership, more shaped by film and television pacing, more comfortable with fragmentation, genre blending, direct speech and interior immediacy. It often moves faster. It often explains less formally. It may be less patient with long descriptive passages and more attentive to psychological momentum.
Compared with 50 years ago, the difference is subtler but still visible. The literary novel of the 1970s could be formally difficult, politically restless, postmodern, baggy, and experimental. Contemporary fiction still experiments, but mainstream publishing often rewards clarity, hook, market position and emotional legibility.
But the novel has not become one thing. That is the saving grace.
For every frictionless commercial page-turner, there are still novels that sprawl, twist, digress and demand attention. Long sentences have not disappeared. Difficult books still exist. Dense, strange, formally ambitious fiction still gets written, published, read and loved.
What may have changed is not the outer limit of what the novel can do, but the centre of gravity of what becomes popular.
What does this mean for the novel?
The shrinking sentence does not mean the novel is doomed. It means the novel is adapting, as it always has.
The form has survived serial publication, mass literacy, cinema, radio, television, paperbacks, creative writing programmes, Amazon, ebooks, audiobooks, fan fiction, BookTok and people who fold down page corners. It is not fragile. It is elastic.
But elasticity has consequences.
If the market increasingly rewards speed and ease, certain kinds of reading muscles may weaken. The patience required for complexity, digression, ambiguity and slow accumulation is not automatic. It has to be practised. If fewer readers practise it, publishers may have less incentive to offer it. If publishers offer it less often, fewer readers encounter it. That is the loop worth worrying about.
The question is not whether every novel should return to 40-word sentences and three-page weather descriptions. Please, no. Some weather can remain implied.
The better question is: are we still making space for prose that asks us to slow down?
The case for the long sentence
A long sentence can do something a short one cannot. It can gather thoughts as it changes. It can hold contradictions. It can mimic memory, hesitation, desire, panic or moral uncertainty. It can make the reader experience complexity rather than simply be told that complexity exists.
A short sentence can land a blow.
A long sentence can make us feel the whole weather system forming before it breaks.
We need both.
The danger is not that books are becoming easier to read. Accessibility is not the enemy of literature. The danger is that we begin to mistake ease for quality, speed for engagement, and clarity for depth.
Some books should be swift. Some should be strange. Some should welcome us in. Some should make us work a little before they open.
So are books getting simpler?
Some popular books probably are, at least at the level of sentence length. The evidence points that way. But simplicity is not the same as stupidity, and difficulty is not the same as depth.
What is changing is the relationship between literature and attention.
The modern novel increasingly lives in a culture of interruption. It is read between notifications, alongside streaming, under the pressure of work, fatigue, algorithms and the endless little demands of digital life. Its sentences may be shortening partly because publishers and writers know the room has become noisier.
But there is another possibility too. Maybe shorter sentences are not only a concession. Maybe they are also a response. A way of cutting through. A way of sounding immediate. A way of bringing fiction closer to the rhythms of contemporary consciousness.
The novel is not dying. It is changing texture.
Still, I cannot help thinking we should defend the difficult sentence. Not because it is morally superior, but because it trains a kind of attention that feels increasingly rare. The ability to stay with a thought as it bends. To hold more than one idea in the mind at once. To let meaning arrive slowly, rather than instantly.
In a culture built around the next thing, that feels almost rebellious.
Not every book needs to be difficult. Not every sentence needs to be long.
But some should be.
And perhaps the future of the novel depends not on choosing between speed and complexity, but on keeping room for both.
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