Why I hate the index finger (1980)

Up until recently, there always seemed to be a marked difference between the way people spoke vs how they conveyed thoughts in writing. These days, it often feels like most writing is just conversational and stream of consciousness and differs little from how many people speak.

It always makes me curious how we generally view the people of antiquity as speaking very eloquently and properly, but that's probably because we only have writings from their time, not recordings of how they actually spoke.

I'm surprised you mention us not having recordings of the older times being why we thought people spoke eloquently. Even in old recorded audio and video, like old TV, it feels to me like people speak much more eloquently.

Go listen to some Teddy Roosevelt speeches, blown away by the clarity and fluency. Or the Cross of Gold audio snippets.

tbf with the advent of text messaging and the internet a much greater proportion of text is conversation

Prepared speeches don't really count; they're basically reading written prose. I'd be interested to hear actual conversations from Victorian times. I wonder if they are anything like how we write them in TV shows and movies.

Well, we do have recordings from that period, but it would be as out there as having a finetuned AI of your own writings these days so I don't know how natural it would have been.

Also, apparently TR used the manuscript much less than most speakers, delivering much of the actual wording impromptu and the general structure from the script, so he was actually pretty fluent off the cuff.