Politics and the English Language

Six rules and one argument: that clear writing is a civic act, because vague and ugly language exists to hide what power is actually doing. Orwell showed how the worst political crimes hide behind the worst prose, how euphemism does the work of the lie. The essay is short and it is a discipline. Anyone who wants to write honestly about public life, or to read it honestly, should keep it close. Quote it sparingly, as the house rule asks.

The English writer who made clear prose a political weapon and political clarity a moral demand. Politics and the English Language argues that vague, ugly writing serves power by hiding what it does. Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm turned that conviction into fiction that gave the century its vocabulary for tyranny: doublethink, the memory hole, all animals equal but some more equal than others. He wrote against the lie in every form he found it.