Marc Burrows (author of "The Magic of Terry Pratchett") is calling bulls*** on this article, and I tend to agree with him.
He posted this on his Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/marcburrow...a6XwczSGw9Y5k3iVLzfvnN9AH1CangWtpx66jm1i7qTbl
Hopefully that's a public post which you can see even without having a Facebook account, but if not, here's what he wrote.
(Plus go to
https://marcburrows.co.uk and buy his books)
"
There’s an article doing the rounds again claiming that analysis shows Terry Pratchett’s illness was evident in his writing as far back as 1997. The evidence cited is a “statistically significant decline in the diversity of adjectives he used”, with the suggestion that this marks an early signal of dementia.
I’m not a neuroscientist. But I *have* studied Terry Pratchett’s writing in more detail than most people*, and I’ve spent a lot of time researching his particular illness. I’ve got a few problems with this.
First, the point where this supposed “decline” begins is just before the strongest run of his entire career — a decade of book after book that includes Night Watch and Nation, two of the finest novels Sir Terry ever wrote. To argue that his writing was already deteriorating years before those books appeared just doesn’t stand up.
Second, there’s a far simpler explanation for a drop in adjective use: he was getting better. At this point Sir Terry was writing at an astonishing rate — often two or three novels a year. His prose was getting cleaner and more disciplined. He was learning, bit by bit, not to let vocabulary get in the way of character, narrative and theme. That isn’t decline. That’s mastery. Unless the argument is that Alzheimer’s made him a better writer, which feels… off.
Third — and this is the big one — Sir Terry had posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), a very rare form of Alzheimer’s that affects visual and spatial processing first. It isn’t a language-led illness in its early stages, and it often doesn’t touch memory or vocabulary for a long time. That’s one reason it’s so hard to diagnose. It doesn't work like other forms of dementia.
When language problems do show up in PCA, they usually come via visual impairment — difficulty reading, scanning text, processing what’s on the page, that sort of thing. Many of you will have seen the heartbreaking footage of Terry trying to read from Nation onstage at the Discworld con and complaining of "shadows" on the page. It can slow access to words, but it doesn’t shrink vocabulary in this neat, statistical way. Terry himself talked about this a lot. He took great pride in being able to rattle off long lists of words when he was being tested, while being unable to copy simple pictures.
Even later on, when writing genuinely became a struggle, Rob Wilkins has been very clear that the issues were about keeping the shape of a story in his head — not about choosing words. And yet the articles making these claims don't mention PCA at all, which is extraordinary when you’re citing scientific research and talking about the effects of a disease. They lump all forms of Alzheimer's together.
All of which is why the whole thing makes me uncomfortable. It takes a deliberate, hard-won change in style and retrospectively turns it into pathology, without really engaging with the illness it claims to be analysing.
* Not that I'm claiming to be the leading expert or anything. There are people who have studied his stuff far more deeply than me. I've gone quite far though."
Welcome back. Good to see you again.