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Does Benjamin Franklin Have Any Influence In Contemporary American Writing Style?

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Does Benjamin Franklin Have Any Influence in Contemporary American Writing Style?

The Little Book of Transcreation, a book dealing with the intricacies of translating from one language to another, describes American Writing Style as “Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you just told them”. This may be the way contemporary English is expected to be written, but when did redundancy become a subject of criticism in the academic world? At the time, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin was written, run-on sentences and never-ending paragraphs were not main indicators of poor writing skills. However, Benjamin Franklin was the exception to that trend. As a man who preferred to save instead of waste resources, including words, Franklin had a simple sentence and paragraph structure mirroring today’s writing conventions. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin shows how Franklin modest background and zeal for self-improvement lead him to develop an economic and straightforward writing style that may be the origins of contemporary American writing style. Franklin’s writing style is similar to contemporary American Writing style because the average reader may not find the text as difficult to read considering it was written more than 200 years ago. American writing style focuses a lot on having a conversational tone rather than an impersonal lecture (Langosch 2). To maintain the conversation, redundant words and sentences are frowned upon because

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