Politics and the English Language, by George Orwell, provides a very peculiar outlook on the English language. Although his observations are very insightful, and supported with evidence by numerous writers, I find his idea that simpler language is better. For years we have learned that sounding pristine and astute is what made good writing. The reason why thesauruses are our best friends, and why we have the constant need to lengthen our sentences is because of the structure people expect of our writing. There have been so many times when people editing my essay will apply the exact tactics Orwell said NOT to use in order to make my essay better sounding. Young writers nowadays feel it to be necessary to use these tactics to strengthen papers, for it seems as though political language is what is accepted most in modern society.
Many writers, including myself, do not rely on simple words to construct our thoughts, for that tactic seems very elementary. I like Orwell’s theory that many people use Latin based words due to the fact that they sound smarter and more scientific. Many times, especially in scientific labs, I will use larger words and elaborate more on theories, just to give the idea that I know what I’m talking about. Kids today have managed to develop an excellent skill of writing without a clue of the actual content- a very useful skill. Perhaps the addition of larger words and lengthy sentences allow students to make their work sound more believable, and achieve the designated word count. In addition, it may also be used in order to remove an emotion from the paper, making the piece less bias and more scientific (based on facts).
What I found odd about this article was that it was written by the same author as 1984. In 1984, Orwell describes a new type of language called Newspeak, in which the English language is made simpler, as described in his article. However, 1984 seems to be a criticism of totalitarian rule, and machine like humans. He especially seems to be casting a bad light on the reduction of our nouns and verbs, for it destroys the beauty of our language. Orwell’s article seems to portray that even the lengthening and use of large worlds can lead to the dehumanization of the human language. So, in order to maintain that level of English we once had, we must resort back to a poetic style of writing, using imagination instead of vocabulary. In a sense, I do prefer this type of writing; however, only for personal narratives and stories. For essays and other formal pieces of writing, the political style of English is still engrained in my mind while writing.
think that Orwells "rules" are impossible to follow if one desires to actually write anything that seems good. While the "rules" do make text easier to read and also undline the point, the comletly murder the orginal work of art. As we demonstraed in class with the speech activity, texts, that were once adressed as history changing and insigtful, were reduced to a few senteces that a five year old could hav done a better job of writting. Of course, th activity also proved that if we did the opposite of what Orwell is advocating for, the speeches were, while perhaps fancy sounding, the entire text had nevertheless murdered.
ReplyDeleteI too found it ironic that a man who writes novels could advocate for such things when it would be impossible to sell a copy of a book written in such a way. Furthurmore the explanation for Newspeak, in 1984, seems to correlate to what Orwell is trying to advocate. Ironically, Orwell does not portray Newspeak as having the same, positive qualities that the dscribe in his "rules"(quite doublethink like, don't you think), but instead is used to furthur control the population of Oceania. So what exactly does Orwell want? I think he's out for totalitarian control.