Education in Context

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George Orwell’s Six Rules of Writing (How They Apply to Your Writing and Your Life)

Clear back in April of 1946 (so, seventy-eight years ago at the time of this writing, after the publication of Animal Farm,1 but before the publication of Nineteen Eighty-four2), George Orwell wrote an essay called “Politics and the English Language” that came out in Horizon.3,4

The whole essay is important and worth reading, so I really would recommend that you go read it — but it’s also seventy-eight years old and, well, a little harder to read than this blog post. Which is why I’m writing this blog post. So if you’re not willing to read “Politics and the English Language,” or if you did read or are planning to read it, but you want to hear a modern take on it, this post is for you.

The Thesis of “Politics and the English Language”

Back when I was in college, I was part of an honors program that held an interdisciplinary seminar each semester. This event took place on the top floor of the library and included the entire honors cohort (about forty students) and all of the honors professors who were teaching that cohort that semester (so the first semester it was a professor of Ancient Philosophy, a professor of Ancient Literature, a professor of Ancient History, and a professor of Ancient Art History).

Despite the potential for these seminars to be really interesting and the fact that they provided pizza from Pugsley’s,5 I dreaded these seminars. Absolutely dreaded them. Spent the weeks leading up to them coming up with imaginary illnesses and family emergencies I could declare so I wouldn’t have to attend.

You know in Anti-Hero (feat. Bleachers) how Jack Antonoff comes in with the line “sometimes I feel like everybody is an art bro lately”?6 That’s how these seminars were.7 Each comment was “building off of” the last comment, just using so many very large words to say absolutely nothing. And also to sound smarter than the last guy talking, or so I suspect.

There was at least one seminar where about half the cohort brought ~spicy water bottles~ and turned the seminar into a drinking game — and the general ridiculousness of the things people were saying completely sober was such that the professors either didn’t notice or didn’t care that half the people at the seminar were drunk.

This entire seminar situation gave me a giant headache, and I wanted to make a strict rule that everybody could use only the one thousand most common English words plus a pre-approved list of relevant words (“The Odyssey,” for example) — a sort of liberal arts take on Randall Munroe’s Thing Explainer and “Up Goer Five.“8

Most of us have endured some similar situation — whether at school, at work, or even with friends and family — in which people used a lot of big words to say nothing and in so doing made it impossible to have an interesting or intelligent discussion, because everybody was trying to figure out what they were actually talking about.

The thesis of “Politics and the English Language” is that such ridiculous use of language — i.e. using lot of big words to say actually nothing — not only makes for worse writers and communicators, but also for a worse society. This argument is similar to my argument about the passive voice, but on a broader scale.

Another Illustration of How Using A Lot of Big Words to Say Nothing Makes Everything Worse

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

-George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”

Have you ever gotten into a political discussion that started off totally reasonably, but then got heated and turned into a whirlwind of words you couldn’t really defend against because they didn’t make any sense, but you were kind of worried that maybe they did make sense and you just didn’t understand them, so then you walked away with a big headache feeling like you lost?

That’s exactly the effect that people who use a lot of big words to say nothing are looking for: they “win” the conversation by making it impossible to respond to whatever they said. Therefore, they know the most, are the smartest, and are clearly right.

Often, they use all of these big words and complicated, twisty-turny language because whatever they are actually saying is one of the following:

  1. Immoral or indefensible in the eyes of most reasonable people — i.e. something that would be important to refute if they said it clearly.
  2. Unprovable or without clear evidence — i.e. something that would be easy to refute if they said it clearly.
  3. Unconsidered or generally sloppy — i.e. something that they might refute themselves if they said it clearly.
  4. Some combination of the above.

George Orwell explains this well, saying “the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”9 Which is to say that people who use a lot of big words to say nothing often do it because they want to hide whatever they actually mean.

Orwell also gives a great example of what this might look like:

Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

-George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”

This example sends a little shiver down my spine because nonsense like this happens all the time. And it’s pretty evil — it’s possible, and even easy, to get away with saying wildly awful things as long as you use a lot of big words. If anybody in George Orwell’s imaginary class were to raise their hand and say something like, “Actually, I don’t believe killing your opponents to silence them is ever okay,” the professor could easily respond with, “Oh dear, that’s not what I said,” and leave this poor student looking needlessly aggressive in front of their peers.

And that’s what happens in politics, academia, and even interpersonal interactions all the time. I, for one, think that this is a problem.

The Solution

The solution, of course, is to speak and write clearly. If we adopted a standard of judging academic and political writing based on its clarity, it would be much easier to spot when somebody was refusing to admit to their actual point.

There is, of course, the issue of people needing to understand how to write clearly in order to write clearly, which is part of what I’m trying to remedy with this blog. But this issue is perhaps less of an issue than you might imagine: so long as you understand what you are trying to say, it’s often easier to write clearly than to use a lot of big words to say nothing.

The actual issue is that we have created a society where we assume that people who use bigger words are smarter or more educated. And while there is a place for a precise, complicated, and beautiful word, this general assumption has to stop. It not only allows for insidious uses of pretentious language to cover up poor thinking, but also excludes people with different educational backgrounds from a lot of conversations, which is a problem in its own right.

My personal solution to big word salad nonsense writing is this: I understand how to write clearly, I practice writing clearly, and if somebody isn’t writing clearly, I become immediately suspicious:

What are they trying to pull? Why won’t they make their point clearly? Is there something to hide here?

Which is to say, the rules of writing clearly serve two purposes:

  1. To make your own writing better.
  2. To give you the tools to recognize when to call B.S.10

If you can do both of those things, you’ll be pretty much unstoppable. (Or at least, that’s what I tell myself.)

Without Further Ado, George Orwell’s Six Rules of Writing

Of all the sets of writing rules out there, this one is my favorite and the one that I think about most often. These rules are pretty self-explanatory, but if you want a longer, more detailed explanation of them, you really will have to go read “Politics and the English Language.”

  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.
-George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”

So, armed with the knowledge that writing clearly is not only better for your writing, but for the moral wellbeing of our society, go forth and write clearly! (And read “Politics and the English Language.” Seriously.)

Footnotes:

  1. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Animal Farm,” Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Animal-Farm. ↩︎
  2. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Nineteen Eighty-four,” Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nineteen-Eighty-four. ↩︎
  3. Note that there have been a lot of literary magazines called Horizon, probably because it just seems like a very literary name. The one that published “Politics and the English Language” was based in London and ran from December 1939 through January 1950, according to its Wikipedia page. ↩︎
  4. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” The Orwell Foundation, The Orwell Foundation, 1946, https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/. ↩︎
  5. If you’re ever in the Bronx, you should go to Pugsley’s. I especially recommend their penne vodka pizza, especially in the middle of the night. ↩︎
  6. Taylor Swift, Anti-Hero (feat. Bleachers), performed by Taylor Swift, (2022; New York City: Electric Lady Studios, 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1d9PiRAJNM. ↩︎
  7. This is my personal opinion/memory of these seminars. I’m sure you could track down some member of this honors cohort who found them positively enlightening. That’s probably who I’m complaining about. ↩︎
  8. Randall Munroe, “Up Goer Five,” xkcd, xkcd, 2015, https://xkcd.com/1133/. ↩︎
  9. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language.” ↩︎
  10. If any of my students are reading this, B.S. stands for Baloney Sandwiches. ↩︎