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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/24895
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I do not see much difference in style between Goethe, Proust, or Hawthorne on the one hand, and whichever book I pick up in the bookstore today. They refer to a different world and use some different words, but if you replace horses with cars and fireplaces with central heating, and disregard the different orthography, the sentences and paragraphs that they use to tell their stories are structured the same.

There has been some influx of film and tv on how stories are told, there has been some experimentation with reflecting thought processes (such as stream of consciousness or Palahniuk's novels), but the majority of narrative writing, both fiction and non-fiction, and both popular and literary writing, could have been written by Melville.

Most readers prefer stories to be told to them in a coherent way and with the same language they would use to write a letter to their grandmother. Language changes with time, so of course there is some difference in vocabulary, orthography, and grammar, but if you subtract this, writing from the eighteenth century onwards has stylistically remained fundamentally the same. All the "avant-garde" experimentation, such as expressionistic writing, has fallen to disuse. Most people today do not read non-mainstream writing from the past. But they do read Moby Dick – because it is just as accessible today as _Harry Potter_.

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As for the discussion going on here:

# You are confusing _technique_ with _content_.

Of course presend day readers are interested in different stuff as back then. The world is different today! What still works, though, is the same _narrative style_ of (prose) writing.

Original score: 1