Tips from an even better writer than Joey Barton

Start The Week on Radio 4 this morning is about political writing, using George Orwell‘s essay Politics and the English Language as a launchpad: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01q8l31. Orwell came up with six practical rules to help people avoid bad writing:

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.

Orwell’s sixth rule means that the writer should break the previous rules when necessary for a proper sentence (Source: Wikipedia). I’d read these as a teenager but as readers of this blog will be aware, exiled them to the Siberia of my mind some time ago. Or is that too flowery?

I actually studied George Orwell for a university entrance exam. An Orwell aficionado teacher at school, Mr. Rankin, coached me with a few one-on-one tutorials, for which I had to write an essay. Mr. Rankin took Orwell’s rules for writing seriously – and I sensed, after reading my first essay, saw me as an offence to the art of wordsmithery (which isn’t even a word). “Ugly, trite phrases” is one comment he scrawled on my first essay. I was hoping he was referring to Orwell. He wasn’t. But there was a power in that construction “ugly, trite phrases”, that has made it lodge in my mind for the last 25 years. Worthy of Orwell himself.

Related articles

• Steven Poole: My problem with George Orwell (guardian.co.uk)
• Christopher Hitchens on Orwell: “What people do not want to hear” (newstatesman.com)
• Wigan Pier and beyond: “So who is Orwell for?” (newstatesman.com)
• George Orwell remembered (blogs.abc.net.au)
• Orwell’s Rules for Clear Writing (economicpolicyjournal.com)