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Today I’m going to be talking about Why I Write, a collection of essays by George Orwell. The book was written in 1946. This particular edition is from the Penguin Great Ideas series, and it features four essays. Along with Why I Write there is Politics and the English Language, also from 1946, The Lion and the Unicorn which was a campaign for socialism written in 1940, and a piece called A Hanging from 1931. Today though I’d just like to concentrate on Why I Write and Politics and the English Language, because they go very well together as two essays.

Moving firstly onto Why I Write, this was written in 1946 and it’s Orwell’s attempt to explain why he himself writes, and also by proxy why other people write too. He defines four reasons, and I think they’re as relevant today as when they were first written over 60 years ago. The first reason he defines as “sheer egoism”, which is the desire to seem clever, to be talked about, or to be remembered after death. I think sheer egoism really goes a long way to explaining a lot of writing on the web today, especially that done for marketing purposes.

Orwell’s second reason is what he calls the “aesthetic enthusiasm”, which is the perception of beauty in the external world or, on the other hand, beauty in words and their right arrangement. Most writers I think want to write nice flowing pieces in the same way that Orwell himself does: his writing isn’t extravagant, it’s quite plain but it’s very precise. He moves onto this subject later too in his other essay.

His third reason for why he writes is what he calls the “historical impulse”, which is the desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and to store them up for the use of posterity.

His fourth reason is what he calls the “political purpose”. He says he’s using the word political in the widest possible sense here, meaning the desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society they should strive after. Orwell in this particular essay claims that he’s not a political writer, but his other writing really doesn’t bear that out! In this book alone, The Lion and the Unicorn is a socialist polemic – some of that piece may not be as relevant today as it once was, but a lot of it is, especially the first part of The Lion and the Unicorn which is sometimes republished under the title England, This England. That’s still relevant, that’s worth reading.

If we move onto the second part of this book, let’s look at the essay Politics and the English Language from1946. This is really Orwell’s reaction against the kind of writing that was prevalent at the time, the very formal, stuffy types of writing that obfuscate the writer’s meaning rather than making it clear. He says that writers deliberately try to obscure what they’re saying to make it more palatable. In fact, the front cover quotation on the book isn’t from Why I Write – I think somebody got confused there – it’s from Politics and the English Language. The quotation, which is actually what drew me to the book in the first place, is “Political Language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Quite!

Orwell’s six commandments, really, for writing as he sees it, are:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. He’s really talking here about not using cliches. People still do that today of course, and some people have even argued that using cliches can be a good thing because at least everyone already understands the meaning of the phrase.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do. I think maybe that these days people are really coming round to this view. There’s the Campaign for Plain English, and the whole heap of faux-friendly informal writing that you get on gas bills and things – everyone’s your mate these days (even though they’re not!).

3. If it’s possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. This is one for the grammar people among you: never use passive where you can use the active! You either know what that means or you don’t! If you don’t, Wikipedia can explain.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. The thing that really annoys me is when people write little Latin phrases when the English one would be fine, eg “in toto” instead of “in total” or “completely”.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. That’s ironic in the way that Orwell has written this essay because he claims that people couch barbarous things such as war in political language. This essay was written in 1946. If you look at Tony Blair and the Iraq war, and at George Bush, you see exactly the same thing going on! There was a book written in 2007 called Unspeak by Steven Poole, which makes very much the same point too.

There’s not a great deal of depth to go into with the two essays in this book that I’ve discussed, I just wanted to make people aware that they exist. They’re worth a read. The first one, Why I Write, is only 10 pages long. The second, Politics and the English Language is only 18 pages long. They’re pretty easy to read, they flow quite nicely, but they are still relevant today, so I really recommend the book to anyone.

Ian Howlett is a book reviewer based in London, England. His blog, Ian Howlett Talks About Books, is at http://www.ianhowlett.com. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ian_Howlett

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