Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller: they were not writers, but wrote beautiful prose. Steven Pinker has spent over four decades studying language and writing and explains why: 1) Writing as dominant medium "One reason is they were trained on the classics, on great works of literature. For many of them, there wasn't the telephone, radio, let alone texting, social media. The way that you presented yourself was through your prose." 2) Unexplored language "Without decades of abstractions and clichés, they were exploring virgin territory. They couldn't easily reach for a canned cliché. They had to put new ideas into forms that their readers could understand. And that forced them to draw on visual images and metaphors." 3) Informalization "There's been a process going on for longer than a century called informalization. Sometimes you look at a picture of someone on a hike from a century ago and the men are wearing ties and the women are wearing long dresses. This would be inconceivable to us. Taboo language, profanities are commonly woven into speech, which again would have been unthinkable a century ago." Mass media industrialized that informalization. Every generation since has been trained on a narrower, more banal diet, and our prose reflects it.