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George Orwell’s Six Rules for Writing: A Reassessment

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By Daniel Adamson |

In April 1946, George Orwell published a short essay entitled “Politics and the English Language”. Orwell’s clear intention was to remedy the pervasive ‘ugly and inaccurate’ written English in contemporary literature.

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.

Ultimately, Orwell’s efforts were underpinned by political concerns, in an era where propaganda had become the arme de choix of a range of oppressive political movements.

“Politics and the English Language” has become best known for its suggested six rules of writing, which might be employed in order to avoid poor writing. Since their publication, these guidelines have become much loved from amateur literary blogs to self-help websites.

Nonetheless, Orwell’s rules deserve reassessment. Much has changed since 1946: the map of Europe has been redrawn, 140-character tweets have become a primary mode of communication, and a global health crisis has brought the world to a standstill. Do Orwell’s rules, therefore, still hold firm? And what lessons might a PhD student garner from reading them?

Rules for writing or rules for life?

Let us take Orwell’s six rules in turn, and consider the resonance each recommendation could carry for a PhD researcher in the twenty-first century

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print

Originality is certainly a watchword of many PhD projects. The ability to break new ground within a dissertation is admirable. However, the quest to express oneself in an unprecedented way should not obscure the clear presentation of research findings. In some cases, certain metaphors or similes have become integrated into the English language precisely because they capture a sentiment in a particularly effective manner. In this case, their replication in a passage of PhD prose could be justified. A preoccupation with originality of prose has the converse potential to lead to the creation of phrases which are simply inappropriate. If writers cannot bring themselves to use an established figure of speech, the best advice might be to avoid elaborate language altogether: simply state an idea in plain terms.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

Concision is essential in PhD research. A reader must be able to take away a clear picture of research findings. Equally, in the time-pressed academic world, accessible prose is a valued characteristic. The academic community is also global. English may not be the first language of any given reader. As such, the avoidance of archaic or obscure vocabulary is a sensible measure.

3. If  it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

Orwell’s prioritisation of economical prose will speak to many PhD students. A limit of 100,000 words is, at first, daunting for many researchers when starting to write a dissertation. Often, however, the eventual challenge will be deciding which words to omit from a final draft. As such, the implications of Orwell’s advice are sound. If a long phrase can be substituted for a shorter one, it creates more room for the inclusion of useful insights.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

Of all Orwell’s rules, this is perhaps the recommendation which is most dependent on personal preference. As long as the use of the passive voice does not obscure the clarity of prose (see rules 2 and 3), it seems somewhat drastic to forbid its use altogether. Rule number 4 might better be adapted to provide advice for life, rather than writing: ‘never be passive where you can be active’. The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated how opportunities can be snatched away in a tragically short period of time. As such, PhD students must take initiative in maximising their chances when they become available. Seek out what can be done given contextual circumstances, rather than waiting for opportunities to present themselves unprompted.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

The fifth rule in Orwell’s list is perhaps only partially applicable to PhD research publications. Particularly in scientific subjects, the use of technical vocabulary is unavoidable. Even in the arts and humanities, foreign words frequently can capture a notion that eludes the boundaries of the English language: glasnost , zeitgeist , détente and so forth. Once again, the use of specified words should not be pretentious, nor detract from the lucidity of research. One potential strategy is to include approximate English translations or explanations for more esoteric language.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

In all areas of academic life, the avoidance of barbarity should be encouraged. There is often little to gain from cruelty towards the work of others. Commonly, such conduct is merely a way of exerting power over those less senior, and is almost never constructive. Criticism is a necessary element of the PhD experience. However, it is most effective when it is used to improve research, rather than to belittle work. ‘Be kind’ has emerged as a maxim of the Coronavirus-era, and it is a motto which all academics should observe.

Respect, not rigidity

Overall, few would argue that Orwell’s six rules of writing do not provide a solid base around which to centre prose. Orwell did not intend his guidelines to be used by postgraduates, but PhD students can find value in several different aspects of the guidelines, particularly in relation to the economy and clarity of writing.

Orwell’s recommendations command respect, even in the twenty-first century. However, it is also rather tyrannical to suggest that a rigid set of rules should dictate universal writing habits. In this blog alone, Orwell’s rules have probably been broken in various ways.

The deployment of the English language is a highly-personalised action, and one which lends human beings a sense of individual character. PhD projects can benefit from a stamp of personality. If it takes breaking some of Orwell’s rules to achieve this in a dissertation, PhD students should proceed with confidence. Moderation, as always, is key.

Daniel Adamson is a PhD student in the History Department at Durham University. He tweets at @DanielEAdamson. 

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You Must Read This

Orwell on writing: 'clarity is the remedy'.

Lawrence Wright

Lawrence Wright is an author and screenwriter, and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. His most recent book is The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 .

Wright Appearances on NPR

Book explores latest jihadi thinking, building a terror network: 'the road to 9/11', al qaeda using internet to spread terrorist message.

Call them buttonhole books, the ones you urge passionately on friends, colleagues and passersby. All readers have them -- and so do writers. All Things Considered talks with writers about their favorite buttonhole books. And the series continues all summer long on NPR.org.

Most people these days think of George Orwell as a writer for high-school students, since his reputation rests mostly on two late novels -- Animal Farm and 1984 -- that are seldom read outside the classroom. But through most of his career, Orwell was known for his journalism and his rigorous, unsparing essays, which documented a time that seems in some ways so much like our own.

At the end of World War II, one form of totalitarianism -- fascism -- had been defeated; but another -- communism -- was spreading across Europe and Asia. Orwell's own country, England, was suffering through a political crisis, as it struggled to find the will to resist the new threat. It was then, in 1946, that Orwell wrote his great essay, "Politics and the English Language," which I first read as a freshman at Tulane University and immediately adopted as my guide. Over the years, I've gone back to it repeatedly, like a student visiting an old professor who always has something new to reveal.

Orwell's proposition is that modern English, especially written English, is so corrupted by bad habits that it has become impossible to think clearly. The main enemy, he believed, was insincerity, which hides behind the long words and empty phrases that stand between what is said and what is really meant.

A scrupulous writer, Orwell notes, will ask himself: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What fresh image will make it clearer? Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? The alternative is simply "throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you -- concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear."

Orwell was a supremely political writer himself, having waged a lifelong campaign against totalitarianism; and indeed, for him, all issues were political issues, "and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia."

Orwell's candor, his steadiness, his stern and scrupulous impartiality are qualities that make this essay still sound contemporary and urgent, at a time when the reputation of so many of his contemporaries has faded. I think the secret of Orwell's timelessness is that he doesn't seek to please or entertain; instead, he captures the reader with a style as intimate and frank as a handshake. It is that quality of common humanity that makes his essay so luminous and his voice so familiar.

Orwell optimistically sets forward six simple rules to improve the state of the English language: guidelines that anyone, not just professional writers, can follow.

But I'm not going to tell you what they are. You'll have to re-read the essay yourself. I'm only going to speak about Rule No. 1, which is never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.

For me, that's the hardest rule and no doubt the reason that it's No. 1. Cliches, like cockroaches in the cupboard, quickly infest a careless mind. I constantly struggle with the prefabricated phrases that substitute for simple, clear prose. We are still plagued by toe the line, stand shoulder to shoulder with, no axe to grind -- meaningless images that every reader subconsciously acknowledges represent the opposite of real thought -- but it is dismaying to read that two exhausted metaphors, leave no stone unturned and explore every avenue, had been jeered out of common usage in Orwell's day by journalists who took the trouble to dismiss them.

"Political language," Orwell reminds us, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits."

Orwell wasn't interested in decorative writing, but his straightforward, declarative style has a snap in it that few other writers have ever approached. In a time when politics and the English language once again seem to be at odds, perhaps his essay can make us remember that clarity is the remedy.

NPR's Ellen Silva produced and edited this series.

How George Orwell Predicted the Challenge of Writing Today

By Masha Gessen

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered in Barcelona at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona on June 6, 2018, in honor of Orwell Day.

Some essays are letters into the future. “ The Prevention of Literature ” is one such essay, and today I’d like to respond to it from 2018.

Orwell argues that totalitarianism makes literature impossible. By literature, he means all kinds of writing in prose, from imaginative fiction to political journalism; he suggests that verse might slip through the cracks. He writes, too, that there is such a thing as “groups of people who have adopted a totalitarian outlook”—single-truth communities of sorts, not just totalitarian regimes or entire countries. These are deadly to literature as well.

Orwell was writing in 1946, five or seven years before scholarly works by Hannah Arendt, on the one hand, and Karl Friedrich, on the other, provided the definitions of totalitarianism that are still in use today. Orwell’s own “ Nineteen Eighty-Four ,” which provides the visceral understanding of totalitarianism that we still conjure up today, was a couple of years away. Orwell was in the process of imagining totalitarianism—he had, of course, never lived in a totalitarian society.

He imagined two major traits of totalitarian societies: one is lying, and the other is what he called schizophrenia. He wrote, “The organized lying practiced by totalitarian states is not, as it is sometimes claimed, a temporary expedient of the same nature as military deception. It is something integral to totalitarianism, something that would still continue even if concentration camps and secret police forces had ceased to be necessary.” The lying entailed constantly rewriting the past to accommodate the present. “This kind of thing happens everywhere,” he wrote, “but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.”

He goes on to imagine that “a totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set up a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist.”

Orwell was right. The totalitarian regime rests on lies because they are lies. The subject of the totalitarian regime must accept them not as truth—must not, in fact, believe them—but accept them both as lies and as the only available reality. She must believe nothing. Just as Orwell predicted, over time the totalitarian regime destroys the very concept, the very possibility of truth. Hannah Arendt identified this as one of the effects of totalitarian propaganda: it makes everything conceivable because “nothing is true.”

As for what he called “schizophrenia,” this, too, has been borne out. In 1989, as the longest-running totalitarian experiment in the world, the U.S.S.R., neared what then appeared to have been its demise, a great sociologist named Yuri Levada and his team undertook a large study of Soviet society. He concluded that the Soviet person’s very self-concept depended on a constant negotiation of mutually exclusive perceptions: the Soviet person identified strongly with the great Soviet state and its grand experiment, and yet felt himself to be insignificant; he worshipped at the altar of modernity and progress, and yet lived in conditions of enforced poverty, often deprived of modern conveniences that even the poor in the West had come to take for granted; he believed in egalitarianism and resented evident inequality, yet accepted the extreme hierarchical order and rigid class structure of Soviet society. To live in his world—simply to function day to day, balancing between contradictory perceptions—the Soviet person had to engage in constant negotiations. In “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Orwell predicted this negotiation, and named it doublethink. You will recall that “even to understand the word doublethink involved the use of doublethink.” Doublethink destroyed the mind and crushed the soul, and yet it was essential for survival. It killed as it saved, and that, too, is doublethink.

But perhaps Orwell’s most valuable observation in this essay concerns instability. “What is new in totalitarianism,” he wrote, “is that its doctrines are not only unchallengeable but also unstable. They have to be accepted on the pain of damnation, but on the other hand, they are always liable to be altered on a moment’s notice.” Orwell had observed the disfavor and disappearance of prominent Bolsheviks and the resulting adjustments to the official narratives of the Revolution—the endlessly changing and vanishing commissars. Arendt argued that the instability was, in fact, the point and purpose of the purges: the power of the regime depended not so much on eliminating particular men at particular moments but on the ability to eliminate any man at any moment. Survival depended on one’s sensitivity to the ever-changing stories and one’s ability to mold oneself to them.

But why, exactly, did Orwell think all this was so destructive to literature? He defined literature as a sort of conversation—“an attempt to influence the viewpoint of one’s contemporaries by recording experience.” He added that “there is no such thing as a genuinely non-political literature, and least of all in an age like our own, when fears, hatreds, and loyalties of a directly political kind are near the surface of everyone’s consciousness. Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought. It follows that the atmosphere of totalitarianism is deadly to any kind of prose writer.” Note that he is once again talking about the atmosphere of totalitarianism: the lived experience rather than the mechanics of it. It would follow that, as with the perpetual lie, this literature-deadening effect can outlast state terror. Of course, taboos exist everywhere. But Orwell notes that “literature has sometimes flourished under despotic regimes.” It is having to cater to the instability imposed by totalitarianism—having to constantly adjust one’s world view—that is murderous to the writer, or at least to the writing.

Orwell’s assessment is based on his own intuition but also on the observation that little literature of note came out of Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. One might reasonably suspect, though, that censorship and fear were to blame, that better writing existed but had to be hidden. Certainly, Orwell could not have been aware of Anna Akhmatova’s “Requiem,” a short cycle of poems about her son’s confinement to the Gulag. Or of Vasily Grossman’s Second World War novel “Life and Fate,” whose existence wasn’t exposed until the nineteen-seventies. There was, indeed, a literature in hiding then, including poems whose manuscripts were destroyed almost as soon as they were written, committed to memory until a time when they could be made public.

Some of this work is great, and this greatness might seem, at first glance, to undermine Orwell’s point. But great works of literature are always a miracle, and they are usually dissonant with their environment, which might be what allows them to transcend time and, in translation, space. But I would venture that Orwell is not talking about the unpredictable business of producing masterpieces. What is lost under totalitarianism is good and even good-enough literature. These are the books that may be popular and even win awards before they are quickly forgotten. These are the books that pad the best-seller lists. The books that will seem quaint, outdated, or, at best, like curious documents of a bygone era in just a few decades. These are also the very books that facilitate conversation, that create mental public space, that influence the viewpoint of one’s contemporaries. Without these books, politics—the discussion of how we inhabit a city or a country or a planet together—is impossible.

Orwell suggests one more way in which totalitarianism kills writing. “Serious prose,” he writes, “has to be composed in solitude.” Totalitarianism, as Arendt famously wrote, eliminates the space between humans, turning them into One Man of gigantic proportions. Separately, she spoke about the peculiar illusion of warmth and closeness that totalitarianism engenders. Totalitarian societies mobilize everyone. Supporters of the regime may be gathered in the big square, chanting their support for the leader, but opponents band together in tiny clumps that are always under siege, always in struggle to hold on to a patch of knowable truth. This is an honorable effort, but it is as far from an imaginative exercise as anything can be. No one can imagine the future—or, for that matter, the present or the past—with their teeth clenched and their minds in singular focus. This leads me to the best-known line from this Orwell essay: “imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.”

I want to zoom out a little to provide context for that famous phrase:

“Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes. Not only is it doomed in any country which retains a totalitarian structure; but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer…. Unless spontaneity enters at some point or another, literary creation is impossible, and language itself becomes something totally different from what it is now, we may learn to separate literary creation from intellectual honesty. At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.”

It's remarkable that Orwell ends the essay on a note of some uncertainty. His lament for the possible—probable—loss of the imagination is itself an exercise in the imagination. That is what makes this essay both a work of literature and a political work.

We live in a time when intentional, systematic, destabilizing lying—totalitarian lying for the sake of lying, lying as a way to assert or capture political power—has become the dominant factor in public life in Russia, the United States, Great Britain, and many other countries in the world. When we engage with the lies—and engaging with these lies is unavoidable and even necessary—we forfeit the imagination. But the imagination is where democracy lives. We imagine the present and the past, and then we imagine the future.

When the values, institutions, and most of what we hold dear about politics is under attack—which it most certainly is—we find ourselves fighting the good fight to preserve things just as they are. This is the opposite of imagination, the opposite of literature, and, I suspect, the opposite of democracy. Fighting to preserve things as they are inevitably becomes a battle to think and speak of things in certain ways, either defensively or preëmptively. In trying to salvage the meaning of words as they pertain to the present, we keep words and concepts from evolving. Salvaged words quickly dry up and crack. Then they fail. We face the future empty-handed, language-wise; we are dumb in the face of the future.

I have been struggling with this in my own work. Last week, reporting in Detroit, I found myself looking at an architectural model of an urban farm. The perimeter of the model was made up of large, symbolically windowless gray buildings. These were the blocks that planners assumed would be bought, as so much of Detroit has been, and developed speculatively into faceless buildings that could be anywhere and belong nowhere. I know how to describe those buildings, and I have the language to describe what’s happening in Detroit. I can write about the collapse of government and the vanishing of faith in democracy. I can write about the disenfranchisement of the African-American residents, who make up eighty-six per cent of the city. I can write about the homogenization and privatization of public space, complete with a private security force that has supplanted police in the neighborhoods of so-called revival, and about the private tram line for the gainfully employed residents of Detroit, who happen to be mostly white. I can even write about what’s not there: houses that used to belong to families, schools, shops, music venues, the landscape of the life that used to be. I can write about the business of buying up and securing ruins, turning even unoccupied space into private space, preëmptively. And I can write about a middle-aged African-American man who was wandering the streets of an apparently unfamiliar neighborhood, most of which was no longer there, looking for the building he was supposed to be guarding; it was his second day on the job at a private security firm.

But how do I describe what was in the center of the architectural model? It was translucent, illuminated in pink here and there, light but not quite ephemeral. Made of plexiglass, this part of the model contained houses, trees, greenhouses, and other structures. Some of what was here was already there, in the actual physical space depicted. Some was not. It was functioning the way literature works: by depicting and augmenting, illuminating and imagining. But what was I looking at?

I was looking at a kind of community, a sort of kinship, and a mode of coöperation. I was looking at economic arrangements that do not involve—or involve very little—wage labor. I was looking at an alternative to private property. For some of the participants, it was an alternative to the nuclear family. I was looking at something that appeared to exist parallel to capitalism. But I still had no words to describe what it was. All my words belonged to the world of the gray monoliths around the perimeter. Of the thing itself, I could say only what it was not.

And yet I think this is the job of writers right now: to describe what we do not yet see, or what we see but cannot yet describe, which is a condition almost indistinguishable from not seeing.

I want to find a way to describe a world in which people are valued not for what they produce but for who they are—in which dignity is not a precarious state.

I want to find a way to describe economic and social equality as a central value—a world in which inequality is, therefore, shrinking.

I want to find a way to describe prosperity that is not linked to the accumulation of capital.

Find a way to describe happiness as a public good, and the current pervasive crisis of mental health in a way that doesn’t involve the frames of norms and pathology, or the language of “fixing” people.

Find a way to describe a world without borders as we have known them—a world in which nation-states are not prized or assumed.

Find a way to describe learning that does not involve the warehousing and disciplining of children.

Find a way to describe justice whose objective is not retribution but restoration.

Find a way to describe politics that are genuinely participatory, that reflect the complexity and diversity of human experience, that avoid arbitrary divisions along party lines and emphasize coöperation around common goals.

Find an ever more complicated and evolving way to write about gender.

Find ways to describe kinship that is not the nuclear family or framed by the nuclear family. Find ways to tell the stories of friendship and community.

Find ways to describe a humanity that protects its planet, itself, and other creatures that inhabit the earth with us. Find words for reasonable and responsible coöperation.

Find a way to describe public space that is genuinely public and accessible, and include in this the virtual space of social networks and other media.

Above all, find a way to describe a world in which the way things are is not the way things have always been and will always be, in which imagination is not only operant but prized and nurtured.

And find a way to describe many other things that are true but not seen, seen but not spoken, and things that are not but could be. Orwell wrote that, for the fiction writer, subjective feelings were facts; being compelled to falsify those feelings in a “totalitarian atmosphere” amounted to the “prevention of literature.” Orwell’s perceptions of totalitarianism formed the basis for his novels, which, in turn, shaped much of our current understanding of totalitarianism. I am proposing that subjective hopes are also, for the purposes of writing, facts. These are the facts endangered by the fear and despair prevalent in our current politics. If one insists on writing the truth of those hopes—or, rather, if many writers do this—the result may not be great literature, which is always a miracle, but it will exercise the imagination. If it is good, or good enough, it will fuel conversation. And may it be half as prescient as “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

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By The New Yorker

The Points of Writing

30th October 2021 by L.J. Hurst

Extracted from his essays on why he wrote, and the problems he identified and solutions he suggested to writing well, here are George Orwell’s main points on writing.

There are four great motives for writing *1 ,

Sheer egoism.

Aesthetic enthusiasm

Historical impulse.

Political purpose

“ One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.”

Modern English *2 , especially written English, is full of bad habits:

Two qualities are common to all of them:

The first is staleness of imagery;

the other is lack of precision.

The tricks by means of which the work of prose-construction is habitually dodged:-

Dying metaphors

Operators, or verbal false limbs

Pretentious diction

Meaningless words

“By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague…”

The defence of the English language : –

• has nothing to do with archaism
• is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness
• has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear
• is not concerned with fake simplicity

How it is done?

• let the meaning choose the word
• choose – not simply accept – the phrases that will best cover the meaning
• decide what impression one’s words are likely to make on another person

Scrupulous writers, in every sentence that they write, will ask themselves at least four questions:

• What am I trying to say?
• What words will express it?
• What image or idiom will make it clearer?
• Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

Two more that they may ask are:

• Could I put it more shortly?
• Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

Consequently there are ways to write well. The following rules will cover most cases:

Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

Never use a long word where a short one will do.

If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

Never use the passive where you can use the active.

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

*1 From “Why I Write”, Gangrel No.4, Summer 1946. Item 3007 in the Complete Works of George Orwell , edited by Professor Peter Davison .

*2 From “Politics and the English Language”, Horizon, April 1946. Item 2815 in the Complete Works of George Orwell , edited by Professor Peter Davison .

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George Orwell’s Five Greatest Essays (as Selected by Pulitzer-Prize Winning Columnist Michael Hiltzik)

in English Language , Literature , Politics | November 12th, 2013 8 Comments

Every time I’ve taught George Orwell’s famous 1946 essay on mis­lead­ing, smudgy writ­ing, “ Pol­i­tics and the Eng­lish Lan­guage ,” to a group of under­grad­u­ates, we’ve delight­ed in point­ing out the num­ber of times Orwell vio­lates his own rules—indulges some form of vague, “pre­ten­tious” dic­tion, slips into unnec­es­sary pas­sive voice, etc.  It’s a pet­ty exer­cise, and Orwell him­self pro­vides an escape clause for his list of rules for writ­ing clear Eng­lish: “Break any of these rules soon­er than say any­thing out­right bar­barous.” But it has made us all feel slight­ly bet­ter for hav­ing our writ­ing crutch­es pushed out from under us.

Orwell’s essay, writes the L.A. Times ’ Pulitzer-Prize win­ning colum­nist Michael Hiltzik , “stands as the finest decon­struc­tion of sloven­ly writ­ing since Mark Twain’s “ Fen­i­more Cooper’s Lit­er­ary Offens­es .” Where Twain’s essay takes on a pre­ten­tious aca­d­e­m­ic estab­lish­ment that unthink­ing­ly ele­vates bad writ­ing, “Orwell makes the con­nec­tion between degrad­ed lan­guage and polit­i­cal deceit (at both ends of the polit­i­cal spec­trum).” With this con­cise descrip­tion, Hiltzik begins his list of Orwell’s five great­est essays, each one a bul­wark against some form of emp­ty polit­i­cal lan­guage, and the often bru­tal effects of its “pure wind.”

One spe­cif­ic exam­ple of the lat­ter comes next on Hiltzak’s list  (actu­al­ly a series he has pub­lished over the month) in Orwell’s 1949 essay on Gand­hi. The piece clear­ly names the abus­es of the impe­r­i­al British occu­piers of India, even as it strug­gles against the can­on­iza­tion of Gand­hi the man, con­clud­ing equiv­o­cal­ly that “his char­ac­ter was extra­or­di­nar­i­ly a mixed one, but there was almost noth­ing in it that you can put your fin­ger on and call bad.” Orwell is less ambiva­lent in Hiltzak’s third choice , the spiky 1946 defense of Eng­lish com­ic writer P.G. Wode­house , whose behav­ior after his cap­ture dur­ing the Sec­ond World War under­stand­ably baf­fled and incensed the British pub­lic. The last two essays on the list, “ You and the Atom­ic Bomb ” from 1945 and the ear­ly “ A Hang­ing ,” pub­lished in 1931, round out Orwell’s pre- and post-war writ­ing as a polemi­cist and clear-sight­ed polit­i­cal writer of con­vic­tion. Find all five essays free online at the links below. And find some of Orwell’s great­est works in our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks .

1. “ Pol­i­tics and the Eng­lish Lan­guage ”

2. “ Reflec­tions on Gand­hi ”

3. “ In Defense of P.G. Wode­house ”

4. “ You and the Atom­ic Bomb ”

5. “ A Hang­ing ”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell’s 1984: Free eBook, Audio Book & Study Resources

The Only Known Footage of George Orwell (Cir­ca 1921)

George Orwell and Dou­glas Adams Explain How to Make a Prop­er Cup of Tea

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (8) |

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Comments (8), 8 comments so far.

You can’t go wrong with Orwell, so I feel bad about com­plain­ing. But how is “Shoot­ing an Ele­phant” not on here?!?!

YES. Total­ly agree!

And “Down and Out in Paris and Lon­don” is one of the best com­ments on home­less­ness EVER!

Good arti­cle. In this selec­tion of essays, he ranges from reflec­tions on his boy­hood school­ing and the pro­fes­sion of writ­ing to his views on the Span­ish Civ­il War and British impe­ri­al­ism. The pieces col­lect­ed here include the rel­a­tive­ly unfa­mil­iar and the more cel­e­brat­ed, mak­ing it an ide­al com­pi­la­tion for both new and ded­i­cat­ed read­ers of Orwell’s work.nnhttp://essay-writing-company-reviews.essayboards.com/

Very thought pro­vok­ing

i am crud­butt

i am crud­butt!

I think Orwell would have been irri­tat­ed at your use of how instead of why.

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George Orwell’s Six Rules for Writing

Cris Trautner 10/10/18

George Orwell published his essay “Politics and the English Language” in April 1946 after a second world war and one of the most extensive uses of propaganda in an era of mass media. In the essay, he offers an argument, and guidance, for clear writing.

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.

From 1933 until the end of World War II in 1945, the Nazi propaganda machine spread its gospel of violence to acquire and maintain power. Albert Speer, Hitler’s lead architect, said at the Nuremberg trials that “what distinguished the Third Reich from all previous dictatorships was its use of all the means of communication to sustain itself and to deprive its objects of the power of independent thought.”

“Politics and the English Language” reflected Orwell’s great concern with truth and language and how deliberately misleading language is used to conceal disagreeable political facts. It wasn’t a new theme for him. Animal Farm had been published the previous August, and Orwell was beginning work on Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell’s Six Rules for Writing

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable.

To guide writers into writing clearly and truthfully, Orwell proposed the following six rules:

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Orwell’s Six Rules are a good reminder to anyone who proposes to communicate accurately. They have an enduring freshness to them, significant to all times and places.

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