Yesterday, someone said that my writing reminded them of George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language. I was honored.
To continue with the thread necromancy, it’s a dubious honor. I’ve seen several well argued scathing critiques of that essay by linguists. See for example the Language Log posts by David Beaver and Geoffrey Pullum discussing Orwell’s nonsensical claims about the passive voice, the use of metaphors, etc.
Orwell was the outraged opponent of totalitarianism and the muddy thinking in which evil cloaks itself
There’s plenty of “thinking” in Orwell’s books that it would be charitable to call muddy. Orwell was one hell of a good writer, but intellectually he’s way overrated. Even when it comes to his best work, 1984, every now and then I’m struck when I read some older book and realize that significant parts of the plot and philosophy of 1984 were borrowed from it. (If you think I’m exaggerating, just read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and James Burnham’s wartime books.)
I’ve read both the posts you linked to—and they’re both horribly written nonsense.
They attack an essay that itself argues that all of the guidelines he stated can be occasionally broken, by showing how it occasionally breaks its own guidelines. Other flaws supposedly pointed out (e.g. that Orwell doesn’t provide evidence for a superior quality in the past) are just factually false: Orwell gives as counterexample the English translation of Ecclesiastes.
Seriously, these posts don’t say anything else: they just accuse it of a hypocrisy that isn’t actually there. Are these the best arguments against Orwell’s essay? If so, that’s high praise for it indeed.
I see at least three problems with your criticism:
Orwell doesn’t provide any useful guidelines on when the exceptions to his rules should apply. He only says you shouldn’t use them when it would make you sound “outright barbarous.” But this makes these rules useless as advice, since the exceptions are supposed to be guided by aesthetic feeling—and those whose feeling is refined enough ipso facto already know what to do even without Orwell.
The second LL article cites a result that the use of passives in Orwell’s essay is in fact well above the average found in a large sample of English prose. So whatever exeptions to his rules he has in mind, this necesarily implies that he breaks his own advice. There is no reasonable interpretaton of his admonition to avoid passives, whatever caveats and exceptions are attached to it, that would permit writing a whole essay with such an exceptionally high rate of passives.
One sample of old text is very weak evidence of the average quality of old writing. Especially considering that it’s from a highly non-representative source. (By which I mean a high-budget collaborative translation by top-rate English stylists, which has also survived popularity competition with other Biblical translations.)
The useful advice is in the first 5000 words of the essay, most importantly in the examples of bad writing. The 100 words or so of ‘rules’ are just a summary at the end.
This kind of teaching is common in other subjects. For example, in a Go textbook it’s not rare to see a chapter containing a number of examples and a purported ‘rule’ to cover them, where the rule as stated is broken all the time in professional play. It would be a mistake to conclude that the author isn’t a strong player, or that the chapter doesn’t contain helpful advice. The ‘rule’ is just a way to describe a group of related examples.
I think it’s better to think of the ‘rules’ in Orwell’s essay more like mnemonics for what he’s said earlier, rather than instructions to be followed on their own.
It would however be reasonable to conclude that the author does not have strong analytic understanding of what exactly makes them a strong player/good writer, and be cautious about the more abstract parts of the advice, similar to how native speakers can tell you whether a sentence is grammatical, but are usually less reliable for giving you general rules than speakers who learned the language as adults to a high level of proficiency.
But this makes these rules useless as advice, since the exceptions are supposed to be guided by aesthetic feeling—and those whose feeling is refined enough ipso facto already know what to do even without Orwell.
Orwell prefaces his rules by the following sentence:
one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
In short, he explicitly states that it’s when this aesthetic instinct fails that the rules are to be applied. And he talks in detail about the process he suggests be used BEFORE turning to the rules as a last resort.
The second LL article cites a result that the use of passives in Orwell’s essay is in fact well above the average found in a large sample of English prose.
Possible, but mostly irrelevant, unless we’re shown that Orwell used the passive somewhere where he ought have used the active...
Eliezer Yudkowsky:
To continue with the thread necromancy, it’s a dubious honor. I’ve seen several well argued scathing critiques of that essay by linguists. See for example the Language Log posts by David Beaver and Geoffrey Pullum discussing Orwell’s nonsensical claims about the passive voice, the use of metaphors, etc.
There’s plenty of “thinking” in Orwell’s books that it would be charitable to call muddy. Orwell was one hell of a good writer, but intellectually he’s way overrated. Even when it comes to his best work, 1984, every now and then I’m struck when I read some older book and realize that significant parts of the plot and philosophy of 1984 were borrowed from it. (If you think I’m exaggerating, just read Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and James Burnham’s wartime books.)
I’ve read both the posts you linked to—and they’re both horribly written nonsense.
They attack an essay that itself argues that all of the guidelines he stated can be occasionally broken, by showing how it occasionally breaks its own guidelines. Other flaws supposedly pointed out (e.g. that Orwell doesn’t provide evidence for a superior quality in the past) are just factually false: Orwell gives as counterexample the English translation of Ecclesiastes.
Seriously, these posts don’t say anything else: they just accuse it of a hypocrisy that isn’t actually there. Are these the best arguments against Orwell’s essay? If so, that’s high praise for it indeed.
I see at least three problems with your criticism:
Orwell doesn’t provide any useful guidelines on when the exceptions to his rules should apply. He only says you shouldn’t use them when it would make you sound “outright barbarous.” But this makes these rules useless as advice, since the exceptions are supposed to be guided by aesthetic feeling—and those whose feeling is refined enough ipso facto already know what to do even without Orwell.
The second LL article cites a result that the use of passives in Orwell’s essay is in fact well above the average found in a large sample of English prose. So whatever exeptions to his rules he has in mind, this necesarily implies that he breaks his own advice. There is no reasonable interpretaton of his admonition to avoid passives, whatever caveats and exceptions are attached to it, that would permit writing a whole essay with such an exceptionally high rate of passives.
One sample of old text is very weak evidence of the average quality of old writing. Especially considering that it’s from a highly non-representative source. (By which I mean a high-budget collaborative translation by top-rate English stylists, which has also survived popularity competition with other Biblical translations.)
The useful advice is in the first 5000 words of the essay, most importantly in the examples of bad writing. The 100 words or so of ‘rules’ are just a summary at the end.
This kind of teaching is common in other subjects. For example, in a Go textbook it’s not rare to see a chapter containing a number of examples and a purported ‘rule’ to cover them, where the rule as stated is broken all the time in professional play. It would be a mistake to conclude that the author isn’t a strong player, or that the chapter doesn’t contain helpful advice. The ‘rule’ is just a way to describe a group of related examples.
I think it’s better to think of the ‘rules’ in Orwell’s essay more like mnemonics for what he’s said earlier, rather than instructions to be followed on their own.
It would however be reasonable to conclude that the author does not have strong analytic understanding of what exactly makes them a strong player/good writer, and be cautious about the more abstract parts of the advice, similar to how native speakers can tell you whether a sentence is grammatical, but are usually less reliable for giving you general rules than speakers who learned the language as adults to a high level of proficiency.
Orwell prefaces his rules by the following sentence:
In short, he explicitly states that it’s when this aesthetic instinct fails that the rules are to be applied. And he talks in detail about the process he suggests be used BEFORE turning to the rules as a last resort.
Possible, but mostly irrelevant, unless we’re shown that Orwell used the passive somewhere where he ought have used the active...