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 specimens 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 Today hardly anyone uses these words, and they haven’t simply been replaced by new clichés.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.