I must say, calling Orwell’s essay a “language crime” is more than a bit overblown. This blog post’s “jibes” miss the essay’s spirit, and Orwell’s playful (often ironic) tone, and thereby misread its substance, I think. The Language Log author completely ignores the terrible examples that Orwell calls out, and the entire premise of the article, in his rush to nitpick Orwell’s prose and “prove” him a hypocrite. I’ll quote Orwell’s essay here, because this is the essential bit:
> Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart
> from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them.
> The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision.
> The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he
> inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as
> to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness
> and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern
> English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As
> soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the
> abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are
> not hackneyed: prose 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 henhouse.
Orwell quite skillfully analyzes several of the most common problems with political prose, describes how they operate, and their pernicious effect. His rules are not designed to be rock solid prescriptions, but something more like guidelines or heuristics. The goal, with political speech and writing, as with most expository prose, should be to make imagery concrete, and language precise, because the goal should be to make the author’s plain meaning understood, rather than obscuring it in a vague and meaningless haze.
The blog author’s “logical” analysis of his final rule is the most particularly stupid. Orwell’s plain meaning is clear: “do not take these rules as dogma, and break them where necessary to write clear and stylish prose.” Instead, the author tries to apply an odd mathematical rigor to show that the caveat is somehow vacuous. But consider: if that final rule was removed, would the essay actually be saying the same thing? No. Is this final warning actually self-contradictory? Not really. It’s Orwell’s apparently too subtle way of contradicting the seeming strictness of the previous rules, pointing out that the device was meant for rhetorical effect rather than to demonstrate firm conviction. (Think about it, if Orwell had said “sometimes passive sentences are less clear than active ones,” the reader could equally call him out for indecisiveness.)
In conclusion: meh, a pretty weak language-lawyer analysis, especially for its premise that Orwell is being too language lawyerly. Orwell’s prose where he “breaks” his rules remains clear, concise, and stylish – obviously said rules can be broken without yielding awful language. So what? Using said “rules” to examine prose makes a decent start at identifying some of its problematic passages. An author consciously considering all of those “rules” while writing may decide to break some of them sometimes, but will also (at least in my personal experience) catch sloppy phrases and sloppy reasoning, and write tighter, clearer prose.
> Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart
> from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them.
> The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision.
> The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he
> inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as
> to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness
> and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern
> English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As
> soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the
> abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are
> not hackneyed: prose 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 henhouse.
Orwell quite skillfully analyzes several of the most common problems with political prose, describes how they operate, and their pernicious effect. His rules are not designed to be rock solid prescriptions, but something more like guidelines or heuristics. The goal, with political speech and writing, as with most expository prose, should be to make imagery concrete, and language precise, because the goal should be to make the author’s plain meaning understood, rather than obscuring it in a vague and meaningless haze.
The blog author’s “logical” analysis of his final rule is the most particularly stupid. Orwell’s plain meaning is clear: “do not take these rules as dogma, and break them where necessary to write clear and stylish prose.” Instead, the author tries to apply an odd mathematical rigor to show that the caveat is somehow vacuous. But consider: if that final rule was removed, would the essay actually be saying the same thing? No. Is this final warning actually self-contradictory? Not really. It’s Orwell’s apparently too subtle way of contradicting the seeming strictness of the previous rules, pointing out that the device was meant for rhetorical effect rather than to demonstrate firm conviction. (Think about it, if Orwell had said “sometimes passive sentences are less clear than active ones,” the reader could equally call him out for indecisiveness.)
In conclusion: meh, a pretty weak language-lawyer analysis, especially for its premise that Orwell is being too language lawyerly. Orwell’s prose where he “breaks” his rules remains clear, concise, and stylish – obviously said rules can be broken without yielding awful language. So what? Using said “rules” to examine prose makes a decent start at identifying some of its problematic passages. An author consciously considering all of those “rules” while writing may decide to break some of them sometimes, but will also (at least in my personal experience) catch sloppy phrases and sloppy reasoning, and write tighter, clearer prose.