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ORIGINAL: samboct

Plus, back then, they were more expensive, and there were fewer writers- so editors could be choosier as to what got published.  Today- there are more books being churned out (I'm guessing here) than say 30 years ago, editors take less time with each, and so we're drowning in books- mostly awful as I agree with you on Stephen King and Ann Coulter  (haven't read John Norman, sounds like he can be given a miss.)  I'll also lay long odds that with the more fragmented reading market, no single book has the market appeal of say Huck Finn over a century ago.  So economics rears its ugly head yet again.

So are there still good writers today?  Yep- one of the best novels I've ever read was Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, written not long ago.  And Khalid Hosseini's "The Kite Runner" packs a wallop, but neither of these novels has anywhere near the readership of the authors you mentioned from a century ago.

While our science and math educational system takes it on the chin, I'll point out that our education in literature is pretty lame too.  All too often, courses use books written by authors long dead, that simply aren't accessible to today's youth.  Nor should they be, authors don't write for posterity, they write for their current audience who will hopefully shell out for the damn book.  So give a kid a diet of Shakespeare, Faulkner, Melville, and Dickens, and you wind up with a kid who has trouble following the language since it's altered over the years, and may not often understand the underlying rationale behind the themes.  Romeo and Juliet is a wonderful love story, but the idea that a 13 and 14 year old are being forced not to wed because they're families are pissed is a bit tough to wrap your head around today.

Where I've noticed the biggest difference in writing over the past decades is in magazines.  Scientific American used to be written for a much more scientifically literate audience than it is today- the same is true of some of the hobby mags I read as well.  But other journals such as the Journal of the American Chemical Society show very little stylistic change over the past 5 decades or so, and there are lots of articles written there.  So I'm not so sure that we can't write as well although your comments about the troops may be telling- but haven't the troops gotten a lot younger over the years?  Also- the rates of literacy have risen, but that also means that there's more room at the bottom- hence it can look like the average letter written by a soldier isn't as eloquent as earlier times.  Maybe in earlier times, the less eloquent soldiers couldn't write at all?

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ORIGINAL: bipolarber

Interesting. I wonder if this study takes into account the increased reading of internet material.

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ORIGINAL: Lordandmaster

Who still writes a real letter?  (And no, e-mail doesn't count.)  People are reading less and writing less, so it's not a huge surprise that their literacy is suffering.

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ORIGINAL: mefisto69
No human empire has survived beyond 200 years........and we are seriously on the downward slide.

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ORIGINAL: Lordandmaster

There's a lot of good information in here mixed with a lot of bad information.

Editors do NOT take less time with books than they did thirty years ago.  The main difference is that certain book-buying audiences have dried up, so publishing a profitable book these days entails a lot more in the way of market research, whereas in the past editors were able to devote more of their time to choosing manuscripts on their intellectual merits.

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ORIGINAL: Lordandmaster

People's WRITING abilities have clearly declined too.  I first noticed this when I heard the letters that ordinary soldiers would write home during the Civil War series by Ken Burns.  Most ordinary Americans today simply would not be able to write like that.  But you can even see a decline over the last 20-30 years.  Whip out a highbrow newspaper from the 1960's or 70's and see how journalists used to write.  But who reads highbrow newspapers in 2007?  Who still writes a real letter?  (And no, e-mail doesn't count.)  People are reading less and writing less, so it's not a huge surprise that their literacy is suffering.