Quote:
Originally Posted by The Man
But I agree that The Elements of Style contains a lot of downright awful writing advice. I don't know what Orwell thought of that book, but I suspect he hated it, though I'm having difficulty explaining precisely why I think this. The Elements of Style seems the exact sort of hidebound, stuffy style guide that produces bland, unimaginative prose, and Orwell decries such prose throughout "Politics and the English Language".
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My impression is that there's quite a deal of overlap between fans of
The Elements of Style and
Politics and the English Language, so I'm not so sure I agree. It's possible, perhaps probable, he would've disliked Strunk & White for reasons unrelated to an aversion to prescriptivism or categorical rules about writing that don't make much sense, don't help much, and that the author(s) themselves frequently violate. Also some of his rules are similar to theirs.
Orwell's a cool guy, but his rules for writing don't strike me as much more helpful than Strunk & White's. The fact that he includes a rule that basically means "ignore these other rules when they don't make sense" doesn't make his prescriptions particularly useful. Then how is a writer supposed to know whether it makes sense to follow the rules or not? What are the meta-rules about when to follow the rules? How do the rules add anything beyond more general prescriptions like "use language that is easily understood by your audience but without sacrificing precision"? Why say "avoid foreign words" if what you really mean is "words that seem foreign", which basically turns it into "avoid words that will be unfamiliar to your audience"?
The fact is that good writing can't be boiled down into simple rules.
And some of Orwell's rules are just bad. Never using a familiar metaphor or simile is silly. Sure, avoid lazy cliches, but metaphors are strongly embedded in our language (my use of "embed" here comes from a metaphor!). Where is the line between a played out cliche and a metaphor that is so ubiquitous that is becoming or has become the common meaning of the word? And it's not like we'd prefer played out cliches that aren't metaphors.
The passive voice is unfairly derided. There's a reason the passive exists, and it's not all about the nefarious things people say. It is simply to emphasize the object/patient of a verb, rather than the subject/agent. There are ways to elide responsibility without using the passive voice and ways to use the passive voice without doing so.
Here's a takedown of Orwell's rules that I would largely agree with:
Language Log » Orwell's Liar
In general, I would say that there's too much emphasis on the idea that
the form of language affects thinking. It's much harder to make hard and fast rules for semantics or the more subtle ways people deceive, and easier to pick out grammatical constructions or words you don't like. But the solution isn't to completely eliminate a construction, and they generally aren't the problem.
Newspeak, for example, has many elements which wouldn't really do anything. Why exactly would we think that changing "very" to "plus" and "extremely" to "doubleplus" would make the population easier to control? Why would regularizing verb forms do anything? Do we think that speakers of languages with fewer irregular verbs have a limited view of the world? None of these changes would hold up over time, as their neologisms would acquire new meanings and connotations, and people would create their own neologisms to describe what they need to. The measures necessary to ensure people use only proper Newspeak is the actual element which would control people.
While this isn't a particularly original insight, I do wonder how much of the ideas behind Newspeak were present in Orwell's other ideas about writing and language. It is an evocative choice in the book, but it works more because we implicitly understand how much control the government would need to control speech in this way rather than because saying "double plus ungood" would actually brainwash people. I think in an alternate story about a utopian group who think that simplifying language will make it easier to learn and easier to understand and easier to acquire literacy or something like that, the grammatical elements of Newspeak would seem goofy rather than oppressive.