In the early ’80s, the era of Reagan, Indiana Jones, and K-cars, I read George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” for seventh grade English class and wasn’t sure what to make of it. Where were the human beings? What was the deal with Stalin and communism? Were 12-year-olds really supposed to care about these things? Two years later, in freshman English at Libertyville High School, we were assigned “1984” and I started to see why people were still reading this British writer’s books. Winston and Julia seemed like people I might know, with problems I hoped never to have but could at least attempt to understand.
I’d heard the word “thoughtcrime” somewhere too — maybe in a movie?
It’s been almost 30 years since I first read this prescient novel, which foretells the security state and a world embroiled in endless war. Regardless of whether you’re familiar with the controversy surrounding Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, it’s hard not to notice a few parallels between today’s political landscape and Oceania’s in “1984”. It’s also not hard to imagine what Orwell would say about the National Security Agency and its billions of captured emails and phone records.
Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, died of tuberculosis at 46 in January 1950, a few months after “1984” first appeared in bookstores. Since then, it has become a staple of many high school English teachers’ reading lists. More often than his allegorical novels, however, I find myself thinking about “Politics and the English Language,” an essay Orwell first published in 1946. “Politics” has been widely anthologized, but I first encountered it in the posthumously published “A Collection of Essays,” which includes 13 other pieces, “Shooting an Elephant,” “Why I Write,” and “Reflections on Gandhi” among the most well-known.
Each of the essays in the collection is informed by Orwell’s calm, deeply logical opinions and observations. His style is unaffected and almost bewitchingly engaging. Joan Didion is the American writer whose voice and prose style probably most closely resemble Orwell’s. The fiction writer and essayist Diane Johnson shares some of these traits too. (Her newest book, the memoir “Flyover Lives,” is characterized by a similarly clear and confiding voice, though on the whole, she is funnier than Didion and Orwell).
Between 2003 and 2009, along with composition and rhetoric courses, I taught college-level business writing. We read and critiqued Orwell essays in the composition classes, students wondering at times why he was such a curmudgeon. In the business writing course, I assigned a text that included a chapter on what the authors called the three Cs: clarity, conciseness and coherence — the same principles that Orwell prescribes in “Politics and the English Language.” Writers are strongly advised to avoid passive voice, mixed metaphors and pretentious language. They should never resort to vagueness and abstractions. They should also avoid spewing all the clichés they’ve heard since birth.
The goal of an occupational writer is, at the most basic level, to help an employer stay in business. Or, in the case of a speechwriter, to help a candidate get elected. The writer in either situation is expected to convey any negatives diplomatically: No news should sound so bad that its intended audience will stop buying a product or will vote for someone else.
What most concerned Orwell in “Politics and the English Language” are the particular challenges of political writing, which, like memos and meeting minutes, should be clear and coherent. You’re correct if you’re thinking that the man who wrote “1984” wasn’t ready to hand out any awards to the people who were writing about the politics of his era. Most of their speeches, op-eds and pamphlets he considered barely intelligible propaganda or blatant nonsense.
“Th(e) mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose,” he writes, “and especially of any kind of political writing. … (P)rose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.”
A few pages later he observes: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’… (i)n the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. … When we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.”
I teach fiction-writing now instead of composition and business communication courses, but I find some of the same problems in my students’ short stories that the memo writers of semesters past were prone to. What does the word “awesome” really mean? What about “incredible”? All year long, we mull over the evidence that writing well, with lucidity and inspiration, is difficult.
Orwell explains that the “scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? … But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent.”
Another British writer, E.M. Forster, gave us more succinct advice: “Only connect!”
If only! Easier said than …(You likely know the word I almost typed, but I could hear Orwell tsk-ing from beyond the grave).
Sixty-five years after Orwell’s death, his work is still very much a part of our literary landscape. With his exhortation to write clearly and coherently in mind, I asked several contemporary writers via email for an example of one of their literary pet peeves. Nonfiction writer and A Public Space editor Aviya Kushner sent the following: “I am puzzled by the popularity of the word ‘relatable,’ especially when it is used to describe books. Many of the great stories we have — such as Noah’s Ark or the Exodus from Egypt — have nothing to do with most people’s everyday experience. But strangely, ‘relatable’ is often mentioned as a literary virtue.”
Sigh. When I first heard “relatable” used by my students, I didn’t want to believe it was a real word, but when I checked, I saw that some ne’er-do-well had indeed sneaked it into the dictionary.
Peggy Shinner, author of “You Feel So Mortal: Essays on the Body,” shared this: “I don’t mind the word ‘raw,’ per se, but sometimes I mind holding it up as an aesthetic.”
The word “raw” does seem at its best when modifying a vegetable or meat or dietary trend. What if we started using “medium rare” to describe something other than a steak or a burger? Could be fun for about a day and a half.
Philip Graham, author of several works of fiction, including the story collection “The Art of the Knock,” contributed this bête noire, a turn of phrase that would likely also have made Orwell wince: “I’m not a big fan of ‘he thought to himself.’ While I’m always ready to follow the path into a character’s interiority, this phrase wins the approval of the Redundancy Department of Redundancy. To whom else could he think? We have no access to the thoughts of others, nor they to ours.”
Writer, actress and former “Saturday Night Live” cast member Julia Sweeney sent me a word package that seems to have joined “touch base” as a ubiquitous, flavorless part of contemporary American business lingo: “‘At the end of the day’ drives me bananas. … I’ve (also) tried to wean myself off of ‘literally’ unless it is literal.”
From Paulette Livers, whose debut novel “Cementville” was published last March: “My pet peeves are the things I catch in my own first drafts. An abundance of adverbs heads the list. I’m not a purist who denies all adverbs, but the ones that stay better be pulling their weight.”
Like Livers, I find myself eyeballing adverbs with suspicion, but for the most part I like them. “Impossibly” makes me snarl though. Lately, and I’m not sure why, I’ve found the word befouling every other book I read, as in “an impossibly beautiful sunset,” or “she had impossibly long legs/eyelashes/hair.” I wonder if Orwell would also have considered it a minor-league thoughtcrime. My money’s on yes.
Christine Sneed is the author of the novel “Little Known Facts” and the story collection “Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry.”
