George Orwell, Politics and the English Language and the strange art of writing sentences that refuse to grow old
There is something peculiar about reading George Orwell. You can pick up an essay written eighty or ninety years ago, settle into the first paragraph and almost immediately forget how old it is. The clothes have changed. The politics have certainly changed, and the references sometimes need explaining.
But the voice seems to arrive without having travelled through time at all. Orwell sounds as though he's sitting across the table from us, slightly impatient, about to explain something that ought to have been obvious in the first place. It's one of the main reasons why I find myself going back to Orwell again and again.
I often find myself leafing through his books. Not so much other writers from that period. Compare that with plenty of other prose from the 1930s and 1940s. Even very good writing can carry the unmistakable sound of its period. The sentences have a certain formality, the vocabulary belongs to another age, and you find yourself adjusting your reading ear to accommodate them. With Orwell, the adjustment is surprisingly small. You simply start reading.
We're so accustomed to talking about Orwell's ideas that I wonder whether we've neglected the more interesting question. What is he actually doing on the page to create that effect? Why does his prose seem to have aged so differently from the prose of many of his contemporaries?
The answer, I think, has less to do with prophecy than with sentences.
The problem with the word Orwellian
Orwell is one of those writers who has suffered the peculiar fate of becoming an adjective. Most writers would probably be delighted by this, at least until they discovered what people were doing with it. These days almost anything involving surveillance, government control, censorship, technology or an inconvenient bureaucratic decision can be described as Orwellian. The word has become so familiar that it sometimes seems to function independently of Orwell himself.
And of course Nineteen Eighty-Four deserves its reputation. It gave us so much language that we still use today. Big Brother. Newspeak. Doublethink. They have all entered the language because Orwell found extraordinarily memorable ways to dramatise the relationship between power and truth. But there's a danger in treating him primarily as a political prophet. We end up discussing whether his predictions came true, which is a perfectly reasonable conversation, while overlooking the writer who made those predictions so difficult to forget.
After all, Orwell didn't simply invent a frightening future. He wrote it. That distinction matters.Other people did it as well (Think Adolus Huxley and Brave New World), and warned us of authoritarianism, propaganda and the corruption of public language. Very few have created phrases that readers can carry around in their heads for the rest of their lives. Orwell's achievement isn't only that he recognised certain dangers. It's that he gave those dangers form, rhythm, and vocabulary that made them memorable.
Before Orwell became Orwellian, he was a writer making decisions about words.
The extraordinary difficulty of sounding simple
Orwell's prose is often described as plain, which is true as far as it goes, but I think plainness can be misleading. It makes the writing sound as though very little is happening.
He put it very clearly in Why I Write:
“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.”
Achieving Orwell's particular kind of simplicity requires an extraordinary amount of control. Consider the opening of Nineteen Eighty-Four: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
Nothing particularly elaborate about the sentence. The vocabulary is ordinary, the construction straightforward, and the rhythm almost conversational. Yet the final word quietly rearranges everything that precedes it. We begin in a recognisable world, with familiar weather and a familiar month, and end somewhere else entirely. Orwell doesn't announce that we're entering a dystopia. He doesn't describe an oppressive society or explain its institutions. He lets one small disturbance do the work.
It's an astonishingly economical opening. The sentence gives us a world, then makes that world strange.
Orwell understood this exceptionally well. A sentence doesn't need to be complicated to be powerful. It needs to know where its power lies. Sometimes the most effective thing a writer can do is remove everything that would prevent the reader from noticing it.
Orwell's clarity isn't an absence of style. It is a style so disciplined that we can mistake it for the absence of one.
The rhythm of a mind thinking
There's another reason Orwell feels contemporary, and it has to do with rhythm. His essays often sound less like formal pronouncements than like somebody thinking their way towards a conclusion in front of us. He begins with an observation, qualifies it, tests it against experience and occasionally changes direction. The movement of the prose creates the impression of an intelligence working rather than a lecturer delivering the results of work already completed.
Take Shooting an Elephant. The essay begins with Orwell's experience as a colonial police officer in Burma, where he finds himself caught between his resentment of imperialism and the hostility of the people among whom he is working. A report of an elephant causing destruction eventually brings him into a situation in which a crowd expects him to shoot the animal, although he has come to believe that shooting it is unnecessary.
What makes the essay so compelling isn't the incident itself. It's the way Orwell moves between the physical scene and the workings of his own mind. The crowd gathers. The rifle is produced. The elephant stands there. Meanwhile, Orwell's thoughts move through embarrassment, resentment, fear of looking foolish and an increasingly uncomfortable recognition of what imperial authority actually demands of the person supposedly exercising it.
The sentences follow that movement. When he needs to establish a scene, the prose becomes concrete and observational. When he begins examining his motives, it grows more argumentative. He allows the reader to experience the distance between what he knows and what he does.
That is a remarkably modern literary effect. We don't simply receive the conclusion. We watch the writer become implicated in his own argument.
And Orwell is often at his best when the argument makes him uncomfortable.
Put something in front of the reader
One of the great pleasures of Orwell's essays is how firmly they remain attached to the physical world. He can write about political abstractions, but he rarely allows them to float away from things we can actually picture.
In The Road to Wigan Pier, he describes working-class life through houses, streets, mines, smells, furniture, and the practical discomforts of poverty. In Down and Out in Paris and London, poverty isn't merely an economic category. It is hunger, exhaustion, dirty work, uncomfortable sleeping arrangements and the relentless calculation of what a few coins will buy. In A Hanging, the condemned prisoner steps around a puddle on his way to the gallows, a tiny, ordinary movement that suddenly makes the enormity of the situation impossible to ignore:
“And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.”
That last detail is particularly revealing. Orwell could have written several paragraphs explaining that a condemned man remains fully human until the moment of his death. Instead, he shows us someone avoiding getting his feet wet.
The detail carries the argument.
This is one of the reasons his prose still feels alive. Abstract ideas date surprisingly quickly because the vocabulary surrounding them changes. Concrete experience has a different kind of durability. We may not inhabit Orwell's political world, but we understand the instinct to step around a puddle.
And because we understand it, we understand something larger.
The war against bad writing
In 1946 Orwell published Politics and the English Language, an essay that has become almost compulsory reading for anyone interested in writing clearly. It is also one of those essays that people frequently quote, summarise and invoke without necessarily paying much attention to the actual prose.
Orwell's argument is familiar enough. Bad writing and confused thinking encourage one another. Political language is particularly vulnerable to euphemism, abstraction and phrases that conceal rather than reveal what is happening. Writers reach for ready-made expressions instead of looking closely at what they mean, and the result is prose that sounds authoritative while communicating remarkably little.
His examples of inflated language remain recognisable. Anyone who has worked in a large organisation will know the strange ability of official prose to turn an ordinary action into an elaborate verbal construction. Nobody makes a decision when they can undertake a strategic assessment of available options. Nobody changes something when they can facilitate a process of transformation.
Orwell's objection wasn't merely aesthetic. He believed that language could make it easier to avoid thinking about the consequences of what we say. A phrase becomes familiar, the familiar phrase becomes automatic, and eventually the writer no longer has to confront the reality it describes.
This is where Orwell's ideas about prose connect with his political concerns. Clarity isn't simply a matter of making life easier for the reader. It is a way of making the writer take responsibility for what is being said.
The trouble is that Orwell's solution has sometimes been treated as a set of commandments.
Orwell's six rules
Near the end of Politics and the English Language, Orwell offers six rules for writing.
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These are sensible principles, although they have also helped create a slightly misleading picture of Orwell as a man who believed every sentence should be short, every word Anglo-Saxon and every ornament ruthlessly removed. Read that way, the essay becomes a handbook for producing the sort of relentlessly efficient prose that tells you everything and makes you feel almost nothing.
But that isn't how Orwell actually wrote.
He used long sentences. He used metaphors. He used repetition, irony, exaggeration and elaborate rhetorical constructions. His prose could be funny, lyrical, bitter, theatrical and occasionally deliberately excessive. He understood that a sentence's length is less important than what the sentence is trying to achieve, and that a metaphor can illuminate an idea just as easily as a tired one can obscure it.
More importantly, Orwell himself knew that rules could become another form of mechanical writing. His final instruction allows a writer to break any of the preceding rules rather than produce something barbarous.
That qualification is more important than it first appears.
Orwell wasn't trying to replace one collection of clichés with another. He was trying to make writers pay attention.
Did Orwell follow his own advice?
Not always, and that's part of what makes him interesting.
Orwell could be repetitive. He could labour a point. His arguments sometimes arrive with more certainty than the evidence comfortably supports, and his polemical instincts occasionally overwhelm the distinctions he otherwise works so hard to preserve. Some of his prose is decidedly more elaborate than the stripped-back style associated with his name.
Even Politics and the English Language is a more complicated performance than its reputation suggests. Orwell criticises bad metaphors while relying on vivid figurative language to make his own case. He objects to prefabricated expressions while constructing an essay full of memorable formulations designed to remain in the reader's mind. He advocates plain speaking, but plain speaking turns out to require considerable rhetorical skill.
I don't think these are necessarily contradictions that invalidate his argument. They reveal the difference between a principle and a formula.
Orwell's rules are useful when they make a writer stop and reconsider a sentence. They become much less useful when followed automatically. A short word isn't always better than a long one. An active construction isn't always better than a passive one. Sometimes a complicated thought requires a complicated sentence, and sometimes a metaphor is the most precise instrument available.
The real question is whether the writer has chosen deliberately.
Orwell was arguing against language that writes itself.
The sentences that don't sound simple
There's a temptation to treat Orwell as the opposite of a stylist such as Martin Amis. Amis delights in verbal performance, while Orwell supposedly wants the words to disappear so that the meaning can pass through unobstructed. One writer calls attention to the sentence; the other tries to make us forget it's there.
But I wonder whether the difference is quite that simple.
Amis believed that cliché was evidence of a writer surrendering attention. Orwell believed much the same thing. Both were suspicious of language that arrived ready-made, and both understood that the words a writer chooses reveal the quality of the thought behind them.
They simply had very different ideas about what a good sentence should sound like.
Amis often wants us to notice the brilliance of the formulation. Orwell generally wants us to notice the thing being formulated. Amis can make language feel like a performance; Orwell can make it feel like a pane of glass, although even the clearest glass has been carefully made.
And Orwell wasn't incapable of verbal flourish. Think of the closing movement of Animal Farm, when the distinction between pigs and men finally disappears. The prose has the force of a carefully prepared dramatic revelation. Or consider the rhythms of Nineteen Eighty-Four, where repetition and reversal become part of the machinery of political thought.
These are not the sentences of a writer who has renounced style. They are the sentences of someone who understands that style can be most effective when it doesn't advertise itself.
Perhaps Orwell and Amis have more in common than either reputation suggests. Both are fighting against the sentence that nobody has really bothered to write.
The Orwell we have invented
The other problem with turning Orwell into a symbol of clarity is that we risk forgetting how complicated he could be. His essays contain doubts, prejudices, reconsiderations, uncomfortable admissions and arguments that don't always sit neatly beside one another. He was capable of extraordinary moral seriousness, but also of sharp humour and personal irritation. The prose is direct, but the mind behind it is rarely simple.
This is particularly apparent in his nonfiction. Such, Such Were the Joys, Why I Write, Shooting an Elephant and The Road to Wigan Pier give us a writer who is continually examining the relationship between his own experience and the conclusions he wants to draw from it. He isn't merely explaining the world. He's trying to work out what his position within that world has done to his understanding of it.
That's a very different Orwell from the one who appears in casual references to Big Brother and surveillance cameras.
The adjective has become easier to use than the writer is to read.
And perhaps that's the fate of any author whose work becomes culturally indispensable. The ideas are extracted, the phrases circulate, and eventually the prose that made them possible begins to disappear from view.
We know what Orwell stands for. We forget to ask how he writes.
Why the voice survives
So why does Orwell still sound so modern?
Partly because he avoids many of the verbal habits that make older prose feel remote. His vocabulary is generally accessible, his sentences often move with conversational ease, and he has an instinct for beginning with something the reader can recognise before leading us towards something more difficult.
But I think there's another reason, and it has less to do with simplicity than with the relationship Orwell establishes with his reader.
He rarely sounds as though he's trying to impress us with the fact that he's a writer. He sounds as though there's something he urgently wants us to see. That urgency gives the prose its rhythm. The sentences move because the thought needs to move, and the writer seems unwilling to allow anything unnecessary to get in its way.
Of course, this apparent naturalness is itself an achievement of craft. Orwell selects details, arranges arguments, controls the pace of revelation and knows when to leave an image alone. He can make a sentence seem inevitable even though its effect depends on decisions that could easily have been made differently.
That's what makes rereading him so rewarding. The prose seems transparent until you begin looking closely. Then you realise how much work has gone into making it appear that way.
And perhaps that is the paradox of Orwell's style. It feels modern because it doesn't seem to belong to a particular literary fashion. Yet the absence of fashion is itself the result of an exceptionally distinctive literary sensibility.
The writer behind the adjective
I sometimes think the worst thing that can happen to a writer is to become someone everybody agrees is important. Importance can be strangely destructive to the pleasure of reading. We approach the work already knowing what we're supposed to admire, and the living writer gradually disappears behind the reputation.
Orwell has suffered from this more than most. We invoke him when talking about politics, surveillance, propaganda and the misuse of language. His name has become a shorthand for anxieties that extend far beyond his books.
But the most interesting thing about Orwell may still be what happens when you sit down and read a paragraph.
Look at where he places the detail. Notice when a sentence changes direction. Listen to the rhythm of an argument developing. Watch how often a concrete image does the work that another writer might have entrusted to an abstract explanation. And notice, too, the moments when he ignores his own advice because the sentence demands something different.
That's where Orwell becomes a writer again rather than an adjective.
His achievement wasn't that he discovered six rules capable of producing good prose. If writing were that simple, we'd all be doing it rather better. His achievement was understanding that every sentence requires a writer to decide what they actually mean, what they want the reader to see and how much language is needed to make that happen.
Martin Amis wanted writers to wage war against cliché. Orwell was fighting much the same battle decades earlier, although with very different weapons.
And perhaps that's why he still sounds so modern. Not because he predicted our world, or because his prose obeys some timeless formula, but because the sentences retain the unmistakable sound of someone paying attention.
Eighty years later, we can still hear him thinking.
And the writing hasn't grown old.
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