One might feel that readership is fading away. But the truth is that it is not. At every age readership has taken its new form and adopted various styles. Today's readers want short and accurate pieces of parchment. They don't want any fluff to waste their time. Neither have they any tolerance for a large essay to come in their active campaign way. All they want is a short, sweet, sound and informative piece of writing.
By making this remark I am not saying that long essays are always full of fluff. I am talking about making things simpler so that readers can easily perceive it. Suppose that we are talking about Neo-Platonism. Now what do you think the current readers would want to read? Either they would be looking for the main texts of the enneads to research or they would be looking for some reliable researched comment on Neo-Platonism. Believe me; they don't want all those heavy sounding and hard vocabulary to hit their way. All the current readers would be looking for a piece of writing that sorts out the main ideas and aspects of Neo-Platonism in a simpler and well organized language. It has been said that Plotinus, the founder of Neo-Platonism never revised his pieces of writing as only the expression of his feelings through writing mattered to him. He (Plotinus) only focused on sending his message and not the grammar or spelling. That is why it is one of the hardest Greek parchments to perceive at times. It has also been said that for this reason Plotinus never revised what he wrote. But if you are a writer and you are writing about Neo-Platonism or Plotinus or something else, you cannot afford to take this kind of attitude. Instead what you would need to be doing is that you need to make things simpler. You have to go through the hard part of researching from a reliable source and make it informative active campaign , well organized and easy to understand for the readers. Then you would be able to get a lot of response from the current readers and you would be able to see through those responses that readership hasn't fade away. It has just changed their taste and appetite.
Modern readers would be looking for extraordinary facts through simple representation of your written language. The art of writing is always valuable but in order to gain the attention of the current readership in 21st century you need to be short, accurate and simple.