I have enjoyed many authors, but George Orwell was the first I looked to for advice. For years, whenever anyone asked me for help with writing, I would point them towards Politics and the English Language, the 1946 essay which detailed his view of the decline of British prose.
Orwell was my favorite author for a long time, and I can’t count how many times I have re-read The Road To Wigan Pier on a tiny mobile phone screen on the bus.
However, I’ve come believe that Orwell’s rules have limits, and in particular that the essay isn’t a complete view of writing.
(Note: I still recommend it to everyone, particularly people who are just starting out in journalism!)
The rules
Like many great essays,1 ‘Politics and The English Language’ starts by taking something bad and pointing out the things wrong with it in scathing detail.
‘The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.’
- Orwell, Politics and the English Language
Orwell’s focus was politics, but the examples he uses have the kinds of mistakes mediocre writers tend to make. Primarily, people often seem afraid of directly saying what they want to say, and instead hide behind a cloud of Latinate polysyllables, passive voice, and stale metaphors, ‘like an octopus squirting ink,’ as Orwell says elsewhere.
Orwell attributes this to the need for political writers to conceal their real aims and methods, because those aims and methods were often unspeakable. Which was a fair comment, in the 1940s, but I think these kinds of styles remaining common in the 2020s points to a more fundamental problem.
Many writers try to be as ‘writerly’ as possible, similarly to the way bad poets try to write as ‘poetically’ as possible, rather than focusing on communicating thoughts, emotions, or sensory experiences, which is all writing is, when you get down to it.
Orwell ends the essay with six rules:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Using the right words
Are these good rules? The first almost every writer would agree with2, but the others are more contentious.
Take the second rule. Using a short word rather than a long word is good practise in journalism, where you need to consider that some of your audience will be ESL, for example.
But is it an absolute rule? I think it isn’t, not in the least because many words aren’t exact synonyms, so swapping a longer word for a shorter one won’t always keep the meaning of the sentence the same.
Sometimes longer, more obscure words are also just more enjoyable. Take this passage from Nabokov’s Pale Fire:
“We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing.”
‘Involutions’ is not only nicely alliterative, but I also don’t think you could replace it with a synonym and keep the sense of the passage. Sometimes, a fancy word works like the icing on a cake; for me, involutions tickle my brain.
I would argue that the word in this passage also breaks Orwell’s third rule, but for a clearer example, the famous opening to Lolita:
‘Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.’
Condensing it using Orwell’s utilitarian style, we could reduce it to this:
‘Lolita, my love, my lust, my sin. She had many other names- Lola, Dolly, Dolores- but in my arms, she was always Lolita.’
The passage above, while shorter and containing the same information as the original, does not capture the poetry of Nabokov’s writing. Sometimes purple prose works in context, particularly when introducing as flamboyant and dramatic and self-centred a character as Humbert Humbert.3
Using jargon to make a point
Fourth point: do not use the passive voice. This is generally a good rule. There are a few examples where you might want to conceal information in a story, or a paragraph reads better in the passive voice, so it’s not an absolute, but we can pass over those.
Fifth point: never use a foreign word, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an English equivalent. This is the last substantial rule, since the sixth simply allows you to break any other rule to improve your writing.
Here, I think Orwell’s provincialism is showing; there is nothing wrong with using Latin-based words. In this case, since it’s lumped in with using scientific and technical language, we can take it that he is thinking of pretentious foreign words4 in particular, but following that rule strictly is difficult, unnecessary, and reduces the richness and variety of the language a writer can use.
Here is a passage from Nabokov’s novel Pnin (you may be noticing a theme):
‘His profound knowledge of innumerable techniques, his indifference to ‘schools’ and ‘trends’, his detestation of quacks, his conviction that there was no difference whatever between a genteel aquarelle of yesterday and, say, conventional neoplasticism or banal non-objectivism of today, and that nothing but individual talent mattered–these views made of him an unusual teacher. St Bart’s was not particularly pleased either with Lake’s methods or with their results but kept him on because it was fashionable to have at least one distinguished freak on the staff.’
This paragraph wouldn’t work without the pretentious, highfalutin jargon, because of the contrast with the blunt mundanity of ‘freak’ in the final sentence.
Journalism and clarity isn’t all of writing
Context is important. A journalist, scientific, or technical writer should probably follow Orwell’s rules, because their main aim is to be clear and factual. Where they fall down, I think, is for fiction. Orwell was not a great novelist, although he did write one5 great novel, 1984, if you judge by the number of ideas and phrases it has added to the English language.
Orwell drew heavily on his background as a political writer for 1984, and many of the concepts in the book show up in some form in previous essays, particularly a review of James Burnham’s 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution, and his speculation about the geopolitical effects of the atomic bomb6. He was a fantastic thinker and reporter, and his best writing is either journalism or what are basically thought experiments, like 1984.
Much as I love Orwell’s writing, I have become less convinced that ‘good’ prose can be reduced to simple rules. Writing seems to me to always be contextual to the society and even the history of the individual writer. Strictly following the rules leads to lack of creativity, and eventually, boring prose. Just easy-to-read boring prose.
Clarity is important, but in fiction there are many different valid approaches. Treat Orwell’s rules as a foundation and build on them, rather than the be all and end all.
- Parenthetically, one of my favourite film reviews is Roger Ebert’s write up of The Human Centipede, which he refused to award a star rating. ↩︎
- Joking that you should avoid cliches like the plague is a cliché in itself. ↩︎
- I don’t think the argument over whether Lolita is sympathetic to child molesters is interesting to people who have actually read the book. HH is a monster. ↩︎
- Pretentious? Moi? ↩︎
- Potentially two, if you count Animal Farm ↩︎
- Which essentially predicted the Cold War ↩︎
Chris Barker 
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