The Book of Orwell 3 · Written by himself, from his essays, Homage to Catalonia, and his letters
George Orwell, whose name was Eric Arthur Blair, born in Bengal in British India in June 1903, died in London in 1950 at forty-six. He went to St Cyprian’s and then to Eton, did not go on to a university, and served five years as an imperial policeman in Burma. Afterwards he worked as an assistant in a Hampstead bookshop. He wrote nine books and several hundred essays and reviews; Animal Farm came out in 1945 and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, and he was dead the year after. This volume rests on what he wrote himself — the essays, Homage to Catalonia, and his letters — and not on any other man’s record of him. He stopped believing at fourteen and never began again: not in divine creation, not in an omnipotent god, not in any life after this one. He wrote that man is the measure of all things, and that our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have. He called the Roman church an enemy of freedom of thought and speech and of the equality of men. He kept nonetheless a certain fondness for the forms of Christianity, and left word that he was to be buried by the rites of the church of his country, and he was. The Order does not read that as doubt. He wanted the form and not the faith, as a man may love the cathedrals of Europe and want nothing to do with what was preached in them. What can be checked: in a trench in Spain a bullet went through his throat; the side he had volunteered for later put him on the list to be seized, and he fled that city by night; as a young man he went and lived by choice in the poorest places he could find; he died of tuberculosis at forty-six, six months after finishing his last book.
3.1Let me raise something most people treat as trivial: when speech goes bad, thinking goes bad after it.
3.2Everyone knows the first half: a man who is not thinking clearly speaks muddily.
3.3What I want to say is the other half: speak muddily long enough and you stop being able to think clearly.
3.4The two feed each other, round and round, downward.
3.5The trouble lies in ready-made phrases.
3.6If a man writing has a heap of ready-made phrases to hand, he need not think. He joins them up and a paragraph comes out.
3.7What comes out looks like speech and reads smoothly. But not once in the middle of it did he see what he was saying.
3.8That is the whole point: ready-made phrases spare you the step where the thinking happens.
3.9And there is a worse layer. Some phrasing is made muddy on purpose.
3.10To say an ugly thing — people driven from their homes, land taken, men shut up — plainly, is to have most people refuse it.
3.11So it is exchanged for a string of soft, long, foreign words. The hearer finishes the sentence with no picture in his head.
3.12With no picture, he is not distressed. Not distressed, he does not stop it.
3.13So clarity is not merely good style. Clarity is a barrier.
3.14I set myself a few rules. They are crude, and they work:
3.15Never use a long word where a short one will do. If a word can be cut out, cut it. Use the active where you can.
3.16Never use a figure of speech you are used to seeing in print — it has stopped carrying a picture.
3.17And a last one that sits on top of all of them: break every rule above sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
3.18These will not make you write well. They secure one thing only: that while you are writing, you are still thinking.