A recent Works in Progress post by Henry Oliver is far too long and repetitious (ironically, because his subject is style in English), but it has some useful thoughts and examples; if you’re good at skimming it might be worth taking a look at. (Warning: he quotes William Rees-Mogg approvingly. But then he quotes Helen de Witt approvingly, which redeems him to some extent.) This is the nub of it:
From Hemingway’s legion of admirers, to Grammarly, to countless books and internet memes about writing well, the idea that shorter sentences are better is dominant. Many people go further, arguing that one of the most important changes in English over time is its sentences getting shorter. […]
I propose a different story. The great shift in English prose took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, probably driven by the increasing use of writing in commercial contexts, and by the style of English in post-Reformation Christianity. It consisted in two things: a ‘plain style’ and logical syntax. A second, smaller shift has taken place in modern times, in which written English came to be modeled more closely on spoken English.
Nothing earthshaking, but worth thinking about. (Via chavenet’s MeFi post.)
That some English became easier to read may seem true if you feature Hemingway. Not Faulkner. And density may vary with clear or opaque terms. Sentence length variation might be worth attention.
William Rees-Mogg was often worth paying attention to, unlike his son Jacob, an almost entirely synthetic person. In the days of Rees-Mogg Senior’s editorship, the Times was still a serious newspaper.
The article defeated my powers of concentration. It either confuses paratactic style with simplicity, or points out the error of doing so, but my eyes glazed over before I could be sure which.
Kusaal narrative typically features extremely long sequences of clauses linked by ka “and”, in which all clauses but the first lack the tonal and segmental markers of an independent clause, and also lack independent tense marking. Accordingly, you could call such sequences single “compound sentences” if you thought school English grammar was a good guide to anything much at all. No great actual complexity is evident in such constructions, however. (On the contrary: the stripping out of superfluous tense-marking is a simplification.)