Like any skill, your writing chops needs constant maintenance. A lot of my teachers used athletic metaphors—your writing muscles will atrophy and grow flabby if you don't work out. "Working them out" involves practice (which you're looking at) and reflection (which you're about to look at).
Like workouts of any sort, writing practice isn't especially glamorous. Sometimes I need some encouragement. And who better to provide that encouragement than that titan of taking things really seriously, George Orwell?
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| If you want a picture of a future where George Orwell catches you writing like an asshole... |
"Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers."
Hell yeah! I'm feeling fired up already. Why wasn't I snidely quoting this essay at my classmates back in high school?
Orwell lists trends in contemporary writing that he finds troublesome: dying metaphors (by which he means clichéd images), verbal false limbs (i.e. "having regard to"), pretentious diction, and meaningless words (like fine arts criticism, apparently). To illustrate the effect of these foibles, Orwell translates a famous passage from Ecclesiastes into 'modern English':
"Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."Orwell was writing in 1946, but this sort of prose is still all over the place. I spent a great deal of time at my college tutoring job trying to convince students not to write this way.
Ironically, the proliferation of blog writing—that bogeyman of the professional writer—has led a lot of young writers to return to a more straightforward, conversational style. But there are still lots of people out there who exhibit these exact problems.
Orwell maintains that this sort of ungainly, vague verbiage is especially prevalent in politics:
"When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine."
Anyone who's watched Mitt Romney speak during the last year can attest to this effect.
Orwell claims throughout that these sloppy writing habits ultimately define thought patterns as well, and that they induce intellectual laziness and conformity when used to discuss politics. This idea—that the shape of language ultimately affects the shape and content of the mind itself—is a major theme of Orwell's work, especially in 1984. Academia calls this notion the Sabir-Whorf Hypothesis, after the anthropologist-linguists who codified it around the turn of the 20th century.
As I understand it, the Sabir-Whorf Hypothesis is falling out of favor, especially in the neuroscience community. But even if Orwell was wrong about the dramatic effects of language on the mind, his advice about writing is sound. He concludes the essay with the following six rules:
"(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never us 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 outright barbarous."
As he says, these rules sound basic. They boil down to eliminating wordiness, flashiness, and stale imagery. But they're really, really hard to apply in full. My favorite writers—Orwell among them—are masters of tight, concise prose. And Orwell himself wasn't satisfied with his own adherence to these rules. If he thought he could use improvement, then I've certainly got a long way to go.
You should come tutor the authors of 90% of the scientific articles I read. Given that the goal is to impart as much relevant information in as small a space as possible, I'm often shocked at how difficult scientists make it for even their colleagues to understand what the hell it is they're doing.
ReplyDeleteAs I understand it, science writing is as awful as it is largely because of a bias towards impartiality—thus all the passive voice, for instance. I'm not sure you can do much about the jargon; it may be ungainly, but it's probably the most efficient way to communicate complex ideas to fellow experts.
ReplyDeleteShit writing is one of the reasons I rarely read the results of studies, though.