Originally posted by richardh
View Post
Playwrights certainly observed the way people talked, but play still had to have better dialogue then what the actors would produce just improvising, and when you consider that there has been a steady decline of form in dramatic dialogue, from rhymed verse, to blank verse, to the sort of dialogue Shaw wrote, to the very best TV dialogue (I've seen high school creative writing that is better than the worst of television, and I mean that in all seriousness), which is more stylized than a lot of people realize, but sounds a lot like natural speech.
On the balance, I think Victorians were wordier than people are today, because entertainment and life influence each other, and also people just had more time then to sit around and be verbose. Writers used to get paid by the word, but concise speech became valued when the radio came around, and advertisers looked for slogans that packed a lot into very short phrases. Magazines started competing with both radio and TV, and started looking for shorter articles, and stopped paying by the word. They wanted to cut corners by cutting down on ink and paper, without cutting the number of articles, so they put limits on words; they also wanted to get papers turned over faster (my grandfather was a reporter from the 1930-1960s, and remembered the push for more and more speed in getting a story).
That's just my opinion, but I've got a degree in English lit., so I've read a lot. You can even see changes in particular authors whose careers spanned the late Victorian era to well after WWI, or even II. They get a lot less wordier.
If anyone comments TL;DR, I hate you.
Leave a comment: