George Orwell – Why I Write
Today I’m going to talk about Why I Write, a collection of essays by George Orwell. The book was written in 1946. This particular edition is from the Penguin Great Ideas series and features four essays. Along with Why I Write is Politics and the English Language, also from 1946, The Lion and the Unicorn, which was a campaign for socialism written in 1940, and a piece called A Hanging from 1931. Today, though I’d like to focus on Why I Write and Politics and the English Language, because they go so well together as two essays.
Moving first to Why I Write, this was written in 1946 and is Orwell’s attempt to explain why he himself writes, and also by proxy, why other people write as well. He defines four reasons, and I think they are just as relevant today as they were when they were first written down over 60 years ago. The first reason is defined as “pure selfishness”, which is the desire to appear intelligent, to be talked about or to be remembered after death. I think sheer selfishness really goes a long way in explaining a lot of what is written on the web today, especially what is done for marketing purposes.
Orwell’s second reason is what he calls “aesthetic enthusiasm”, which is the perception of beauty in the external world, or, conversely, beauty in words and their correct arrangement. I think most writers want to write nice flowing pieces the same way Orwell himself does: his writing is not fancy, it’s quite simple but very precise. He also goes on to this topic later in his other essay by him.
His third reason for writing is what he calls the “historical drive,” which is the desire to see things as they are, to discover the true facts and store them up for posterity’s use.
His fourth reason is what he calls “political purpose.” He says that he is using the word political in the broadest possible sense here, meaning the desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s ideas about the kind of society they should fight for. Orwell in this particular essay claims that he is not a political writer, but his other writings don’t really confirm that! In this book alone, The Lion and the Unicorn is a socialist polemic: some of that piece may not be as relevant today as it once was, but much of it is, especially the first part of The Lion and the Unicorn, which it is sometimes republished under the title England, this England. That is still relevant, worth reading.
If we turn to the second part of this book, let’s look at the essay Politics and the English Language from 1946. This is really Orwell’s reaction against the type of writing that was prevalent at the time, the very formal and stifling types of writing that obfuscate the writer’s meaning rather than clarify it. He says that the writers deliberately try to obscure what they say to make it more palatable. In fact, the quote on the book cover is not from Why I Write, I think someone got it wrong there, it’s from Politics and the English Language. The quote, which is actually what drew me to the book in the first place, is “The political language is designed to make lies ring true and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to the pure wind.” Let!
Orwell’s six commandments, actually, to write as he sees it, are:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print. He’s really talking here about not using clichés. People still do that today, of course, and some people have even argued that using clichés can be a good thing because at least everyone already understands the meaning of the phrase.
2. Never use a long word when a short one will do. I think maybe these days people are really coming to this point of view. There’s the Campaign for Plain English, and all the bunch of fake friendly informal writing you get on gas bills and stuff – they’re all your buddies these days (even if they’re not!).
3. If it is possible to cut a word, always cut it.
4. This is one for the grammar people among you: never use the passive where you can use the active! You either know what that means or you don’t! If it doesn’t, Wikipedia can explain it.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, scientific word, or slang word if you can think of an equivalent in everyday English. What really annoys me is when people write little sentences in Latin when English would be fine, for example “in toto” instead of “in total” or “completely”.
6. Break any of these rules rather than say something completely barbaric. That is ironic in the way that Orwell has written this essay because he claims that people express barbaric things like war in political language. This essay was written in 1946. If you look at Tony Blair and the Iraq war, and at George Bush, you see exactly the same thing! There was a book written in 2007 called Unspeak by Steven Poole, which also makes much the same point.
There isn’t a lot of depth to go into the two essays in this book that I’ve discussed, I just wanted people to realize that they exist. They are worth reading. The first, Why I Write, has only 10 pages. The second, Politics and the English Language, is only 18 pages. They’re pretty easy to read, they flow nicely, but they’re still relevant today, so I really recommend the book to anyone.