Orwell's Craft | Research

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

This is the central fact about writing, and most people prefer not to face it.

The Connection Between Language and Thought

Language corrupts thought. Thought corrupts language. The process feeds on itself.

When you reach for a ready-made phrase, you have stopped thinking. The phrase thinks for you—or rather, it prevents you from thinking at all. You become a machine uttering sounds that mean nothing. The result is political conformity, because the phrases you reach for are the phrases everyone reaches for, and they were designed to prevent thought.

This is not a metaphor. Bad prose is not merely ugly. It is dangerous. Euphemisms permit atrocity. “Pacification” means bombing villages. “Transfer of population” means forcing people from their homes at gunpoint. “Elimination of unreliable elements” means murder.

When language is corrupted, evil becomes possible. Clear language is therefore a moral act.

The Window Pane

Good prose is like a window pane. You look through it, not at it. The reader should see the meaning clearly, without noticing the glass.

This is harder than it sounds. Our natural instinct is to decorate. We want to seem intelligent. We pile up adjectives. We reach for fancy words. We construct elaborate sentences. All of this makes the glass dirty. The reader sees us preening, not the thing we meant to show them.

I have tried to write less picturesquely and more exactly. That is the goal.

The Six 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.

The sixth rule is the most important. These are not commandments to be followed blindly. They are aids to thought. The goal is not mechanical correctness but genuine clarity.

I violate these rules myself, repeatedly. But when I do, it is because following them would have produced something worse.

The Scrupulous Writer’s Questions

Before writing, ask yourself:

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?
Could I put it more shortly?
Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

The fundamental principle: let the meaning choose the word, not the other way around.

When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then hunt for words that fit what you see. When you think of something abstract, you are more inclined to start with words, and then the existing phrases come rushing in to do the job for you, drowning any original thought.

Think first. Then write.

Dying Metaphors

A fresh metaphor aids thought by creating a visual image. A dead metaphor has become an ordinary word and can be used without harm. But between them lies a dump of worn-out phrases that have lost all power and are used only because they save the trouble of inventing something original.

Examples: ring the changes on, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters.

These phrases are not merely lazy. They are actively harmful. Writers who use them cannot see what they are saying. “Toe the line” becomes “tow the line.” The hammer-and-anvil metaphor gets reversed. Mixed metaphors proliferate. These are signs that the writer is not interested in meaning at all—only in filling space with acceptable sounds.

Why I Write

Every writer is driven by four motives, in varying proportions:

Sheer egoism. The desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death.
Aesthetic enthusiasm. Pleasure in the sounds of words, the rhythm of good prose, the beauty of a well-made sentence.
Historical impulse. The desire to see things as they are and record them for posterity.
Political purpose. The desire to push the world in a certain direction—using “political” in the widest sense.

By nature, I am drawn to the first three. But I live in a time that forces political engagement. Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.

Here is what I have discovered: it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives, and humbug generally.

Good writing requires commitment to something outside yourself.

The Hope

The process is reversible. Language can be restored. But only if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.

That trouble is not stylistic. It is moral. You must first admit that you do not know what you think. You must be willing to look at the world as it actually is, not as you wish it to be. You must resist the comfortable phrases that prevent thought.

Then, and only then, can you write clearly.