Editing Plain language (section)

===19th century===
By the end of the 19th century, scholars began to study the features of plain language. A. L. Sherman, a professor of English literature at the University of Nebraska, wrote ''Analytics of Literature: A Manual for the Objective Study of English Prose and Poetry'' in 1893. In this work, Sherman showed that the typical English sentence has shortened over time and that spoken English is a pattern for written English.

Sherman wrote: <blockquote>
Literary English, in short, will follow the forms of the standard spoken English from which it comes. No man should talk worse than he writes, no man writes better than he should talk.... The oral sentence is clearest because it is the product of millions of daily efforts to be clear and strong. It represents the work of the race for thousands of years in perfecting an effective instrument of communication.
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