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If you want to improve your writing in 30 minutes, read George Orwell's essay Politics and the English Language . “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way,” he begins. After analysing some contemporary samples of terrible prose, he provides his famous six rules for good writing, starting with: “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.”
Orwell's essay appeared 70 years ago this month in Horizon magazine, but his advice hasn't dated. What has changed, and for the better, is language. The kind of plain speech he favoured has now gone mainstream. Political language in particular—Orwell's great concern—is much clearer today. To find the kind of bad writing that serves to hide truths, you have to look elsewhere.
His essay lists various useless, ugly or pretentious words and phrases that were common in political language then: “take up the cudgel for” “mailed fist” “clarion” “hotbed” “petit bourgeois”. Today hardly anyone uses these words, and they haven't simply been replaced by new clichés. Rather, just as Orwell hoped, written language has become more like speech.
That's partly thanks to email and social media. Everyone's a writer nowadays. Most people on Facebook, Twitter or blogs try to sound like Orwell: they use everyday words, and speak in the subjective “I” rather than as some fake-omniscient expert. Some of this clear writing is stupid, and some is clever. What it doesn't do is use fancy language to make stupidity sound clever.
The casual style has spread across professional writing too. In Orwell's day, writers often paraded their learning. He cites a sentence from Professor Harold Laski, which starts, “I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a 17th-century Shelley had not become...”
But nobody is trying to reach readers today writes like that. Modern-day populism discourages pretentious displays of learning. The idea that educated people know best has become, for better and worse, a political taboo. Technological change has also helped make pretentiousness unfashionable. Laski's editor had no idea which articles people read and which they didn't. But now we know not just what people click on, but how far down the article they read. On the downside, that encourages “clickbait”. On the upside, it encourages writers to be clear.
However, some areas of bad English survive. One is business jargon, wonderfully recorded by my colleague Lucy Kellaway. Business people use words such as “go-forward scenario” and “flexponsive” because they are trying to sound cutting-edge.
Most people today know how to communicate. If they sound unintelligible, it's probably because they want to.
11. According to George Orwell, bad English was characterized by ______.
[A] vagueness
[B] fragmentedness
[C] repetitiveness
[D] theories
12. We can learn from Paragraph 2 that English has become more ______.
[A] unintelligible
[B] explicit
[C] inflexible
[D] popular
13. When people write on social media, they tend to ______.
[A] be subjective in their arguments
[B] act as having unlimited knowledge
[C] make stupid language funny
[D] avoid using pretentious language
14. The changes of professional writing indicate that ______.
[A] Harold Laski was not allowed to write in casual style
[B] educated people know little about political taboo
[C] showing off one's knowledge is rejected by readers
[D] technological changes have redefined fashion
15. It can be inferred that today some people use unintelligible language in that ______.
[A] they try to sound more learned
[B] they do not want to be understood
[C] they do not care others' response
[D] they do not know how to communicate