Academic Writing is Getting Harder To Read

Academic writing has become significantly less readable over the past 80 years, particularly in humanities and social sciences, according to an analysis of 347,000 PhD abstracts by The Economist. Using the Flesch reading-ease test, researchers found that readability scores in humanities and social sciences plunged from 37 in the 1940s to 18 in the 2020s. The decline was observed across all disciplines, with humanities and social sciences becoming as complex as natural sciences by the 1990s. The study, examining abstracts from 1812 to 2023, covered English-language doctoral theses from British universities.

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