One might think that predictive keyboards would make the epistolary genre more accessible, but I'm still seeing a general decline in paragraph count between olduse.net and online conversations pretty much everywhere outside of /r/AskHistorians.
(Theodore Roosevelt's 1903 State of the Union speech had a Flesch-Kinkaid score of 15,1. But then again, apparently even Queen Elizabeth's christmas messages have become measurably less posh over her lifetime)
> even Queen Elizabeth's christmas messages have become measurably less posh
To be clear, her reduced 'poshness' is due to changes in her pronunciation over the years, not the content or reading age required. She has moved to a more generic southern English accent rather than the 'cut glass' accent of the upper classes when she was born, in which 'house' would be pronounced 'hice' and 'trousers' as 'trizers'.
(Theodore Roosevelt's 1903 State of the Union speech had a Flesch-Kinkaid score of 15,1. But then again, apparently even Queen Elizabeth's christmas messages have become measurably less posh over her lifetime)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/feb/12/st...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1080228.stm