Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Has to be said
Just whisked through a piece by the fabulous George Orwell (Eric Blair) titled Politics and the English Language (available on Gutenberg).
A crisp essay on how to utilise English to its best possible way without being needlessly verbose. Using a language most efficiently does not always mean using big, unpronounceable words and sentences that stretch around the block!
As a journalist, we were always asked to follow some thumb rules. Here they are again - summarised succintly.
[..]modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, andmaking the results presentable by sheer humbug.
[...]
I think the following rules will cover most cases:
(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 barbarous.
Read the full essay here.
A crisp essay on how to utilise English to its best possible way without being needlessly verbose. Using a language most efficiently does not always mean using big, unpronounceable words and sentences that stretch around the block!
As a journalist, we were always asked to follow some thumb rules. Here they are again - summarised succintly.
[..]modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, andmaking the results presentable by sheer humbug.
[...]
I think the following rules will cover most cases:
(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 barbarous.
Read the full essay here.
# posted by Janaki @ 1:41 pm 
Comments:
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I am very very thankful to you for introducing me to this essay. Haven;t read it fully yet, but it promises something very enlightening to me. I have been thinking about the english language since quite sometime, and there couldn't have been a better man to guide me further than George Orwell. Ever since I read 1984, I rate him as one of the best ever. Its sad that he didnt write much and died too early.
Please do keep posting such superb work. I frequently write about the books that I read myself. You can look up in the archives for some of them if you wish to.
-- Akshaya
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Please do keep posting such superb work. I frequently write about the books that I read myself. You can look up in the archives for some of them if you wish to.
-- Akshaya
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