George Orwell in his ‘Politics and the English Language’ suggested a set of guidelines for writers that have strongly influenced my own work. He asserted that a scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
What am I trying to say?
What words will express it?
What image or idiom will make it clearer?
Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
I came to love Orwell’s work some forty years ago and read everything of his I could get my youthful, sweaty hands on, but nothing of his had a greater influence upon me than the above four questions. In all my writing I try to bear them in mind, but particularly when the fairly hideous first draft has been set down and the time for rewriting is at hand. These questions are so fundamental to all good writing that I see them almost as a writer’s written constitution; to me these truths are self-evident and require no elaboration or qualification.
However, he then went on to suggest two more questions that the writer should ask himself:
Could I put it more shortly?
Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
I have reservations about both of these points. Brevity is a fine virtue in writing; I could mention several authors who I wish had been terse to the point of failing to write at all. Yet there are also some wonderful expansive works of fiction that I would not lose a word of. I can also think of some very ‘ugly’ pieces of writing that are wonderful to read. In fact the context in which Orwell makes these comments makes it clear that he is referring to political writing, and not to fiction at all, a point that is often missed by contemporary students. The same is true of his six writing ‘rules’:
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.
Orwell was a journalist and a man of his time, and these rules still stand as the political writer’s written constitution. Yet authors might now question one or two of these points. One only need study the last of these to realise that some modern literature has left Orwell behind.
My own relationship with these guidelines is ambiguous. I bear them in mind at all times, but I do not always adopt them. The importance of these principles is that they require the writer to think about what he says and how he says it, not that he slavishly follows them; Orwell was after all the most anti-totalitarian writer anyone could name.