Assignment for 9/29 - Orwell

“In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender them.”

George Orwell’s style is authoritative. From the first sentence, “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it,” it is obvious that the writer is about to Have Definite Opinions. He is not writing to puzzle a matter over. He is writing to state his case, and if you don’t like it, you shouldn’t read it, since you probably wouldn’t agree with him anyway. He commands vocabulary, sentence structure, and thought with such facility, that it is easy to be swept away.

He shows problems in the English language, and explains how they effect political discourse, which in turn effects the lives and, in some cases, deaths of people all around the world. “... to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.” There is a method to his writing. He is showing all the ways in which the English language can be used to persuade, as he convinces his readership that there is something wrong with English as she is writ, and further, that English can be saved from its own dustbin.

Orwell’s definition of what makes for good political writing follows Strunk and White very closely. He would be in automatic opposition to the notion of “style” as we have been discussing it, but for a single sentence at the end of the essay. “I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.” The “literary use of language,” apparently, is doing something other than expressing thought. Not precisely concealing or preventing it, but another remove is present in his lexicon of what sort of language belongs where.

He is exquisitely aware throughout his writing. He keeps track of what it is doing, even to the point where he acknowledges that he has been breaking his own rules. His sixth rule is the most important: “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.” He bows to style even as he attempts to prescribe it, opening the door to the almost inevitable conclusion that having a conscious style is the most important part of writing anything.

He blames lazy thought for the preponderance of bad writing. He blames a society that rewards stock phrases arranged in a way that hits the ear well while saying nothing. (See Clinton’s inaugural speech.) He blames politicians who are not interested in having their meaning understood. He does not use anaphora.

What Orwell does do is vary his sentence structures. He writes in compound-complex sentences with many modifying clauses, or he writes in shorter sentences, or somewhere in between. His writing is periodic, thought out beforehand to the last comma. He is fond of parallelisms and of weighing one part of his paragraph against another part, using phrases like, “On the contrary,” and, “On the other hand.” In a looser style, he would be accused of talking to himself. But in this piece, he is most clearly writing to himself. The difference is startling. His style is often hypotactic, but never less than strategic. His voice is consistently strident and often caustic. He does not fall into the trap of the writing he complains about because he is writing about something concrete. Writing is not abstract. It might be about abstractions, but words and punctuation can be pinned down and taken apart.