Why I Write (13 page)

i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print,

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article. I have not here been considering the literary use of
language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase
^*
and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some
jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno
or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs.

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‘A Hanging' first published 1931
‘The Lion and the Unicorn' first published 1940
‘Politics and the English Language' first published 1946
‘Why I Write' first published 1946
This collection first published in Penguin Books 2004

Copyright © the Estate of Sonia Brownell Orwell, 1984

Taken from the Penguin Classics edition
Essays
, introduced by Bernard Crick

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-0-141-98060-7