Throughout my professional life I had to write countless memos, letters, articles, position papers, essays, and all manner of other forms of prose, and the presence of George Orwell was always by my side to guide my writing.
Because I fear that the sands of oblivion will inevitably bury this master of the English language, I want to show courage and revive for younger generations George Orwell’s practical, if not indispensable, rules for writing.
At one of the end-of-the-year parties I attended last year, I had the opportunity to meet two young university students (in their final year) and chat with them for a while. Of course, the fact that both young women were majoring in English Literature piqued my interest, as I was genuinely interested in learning what their generation was reading in college today.
To begin with, I soon realized (during our face-to-face) that I had to close the ‘generation gap’. Imagine my surprise when I learned that neither of the two young women had seen the movie “Rebel Without a Cause,” and neither knew who James Dean was. Well, there’s not much here. While the movie does play on TV from time to time, there’s really no reason why the younger generation should be interested in a 1955 movie. As I was reading (at the time) Peter Ackroyd’s prose version from Chaucer’s book canterbury talesI asked for their opinion on Chaucer.
“It’s not required reading, it’s not in the curriculum,” they replied.
While many people build dams, bridges, pyramids, castles, cathedrals, and skyscrapers, only a few build languages. And two of the few who built the English language are Chaucer and Shakespeare. Geoffrey Chaucer lived in the fourteenth century and William Shakespeare in the sixteenth. what Homer and Hesiod are to the Greeks; what Cervantes is to Spanish and what Dante is to Italian, the same as Chaucer and Shakespeare for the English language. Next in importance is the prolific writer George Orwell, whose self-proclaimed mission was to preserve, maintain and care for the beauty and practicality of English.
Given the above surprises with the aforementioned college students, I’d like to share Orwell’s writing rules that have been helpful companions to me in my many years in business and academia:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print. 2. Never use a long word when a short one will suffice. 3. If it is possible to cut a word, always cut it. 4. Never use the passive where you can use the active. 5. Never use a foreign phrase, scientific word, or slang word if you can think of an equivalent in everyday English. 6. Break any of these rules rather than say something completely barbaric.
Furthermore, Orwell not only wrote useful and practical essays on the proper use of the English language, he also wrote great fiction. His novels Animal Farm and 1984, the first satirical and the second prophetic, represent what we now call Orwellian nightmares. Though inadvertently written, many of his aphorisms are now a fixture in the English language: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past (1984)”.
To complete my respect for George Orwell, I will say that he was a man of convictions: he served his country when he was called to serve, faithful to his politics, rebellious against authority, and a man of suffering and passion. These are his words:
“The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 changed the balance and from then on I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for the Democratic socialism, as I understand it.”
It is through writing that he exorcised his demons; not writing trivialities, but writing about noble and serious subjects; not as a refined or purist stylist, but as a sober journalist; not as a learned academic or a flowery writer, but as a practical man; not with vain dreams of glory, but with a humble and deep desire to serve his reading public.
Orwell’s legacy is great, but at the end of the day, his rules for writing well are the ones that move me the most.
To further honor George Orwell, let me go back to my third paragraph and delete the face-to-face, which violates rule 5. And from the last paragraph, let me delete “at the end of the day,” an expression I’ve often heard and seen in print. .