George Orwell's 4 Tips For Speaking Clearly

here lies eric arthur blair a man who had such a deep impact on 20th century political writing that his surname has become a metonym for dystopia and no i'm not talking about blarism if you're wondering why i've driven 30 minutes to visit the grave of a man who you perhaps have never even heard of you may be more familiar with the pen name that he wrote under george orwell and perhaps a graveyard is a fitting place to open today's video in which i want to talk about orwell's views on a tragedy that he perceived as

far back as 1946 the death of the english language orwell was first and foremost a political writer with a particular care for clarity of language which he felt was a necessary precondition for clarity of thought so much of political disaster as he saw it can be attributed to the lack of this crucial component in our thinking and our speaking and our writing orwell's most celebrated work of course 1984 is in many ways a book about language and how its erosion has a corrupting influence not only on the way that we communicate but also on the

way that we think and especially the way that we think about politics say what you will about the state of modern political discourse you'll have a hard time arguing that it's characterized by clarity or lack of ambiguity and this is what orwell was so terrified of it's something of a trope to recognize that the english language is in decline and to complain about the fact that the newer generations are corrupting it so carelessly but the good news is that orwell thought that there was something we can do about this and in fact gave us some

very specific tips on how we can avoid this erosion of our thinking and of our writing and how we can aim to be much more clear in the discussion of political topics today of course orwell is mostly remembered for his works of fiction but he also has an expansive corpus of essays one in particular called politics and the english language written in 1946 is one of the most insightful commentaries on this subject of language available in print even to this day and so today we're going to explore that essay and the tips that he gives

for writing more clearly and discover why it is that orwell is still remembered even now as one of the clearest and most intelligent writers of the 20th century orwell begins his essay by providing some examples of bad modern english in order to fix our writing of course we need an idea of what it is that's going wrong here's one example that he cites written by harold lasky i am not indeed sure whether it is not true to say that milton who once seemed not unlike a 17th century shelley had not become out of an experience

ever more bitter in each year more alien to the founder of that jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate got that of course not what on earth did that sentence mean this kind of lack of clarity is something that orwell thought was found all over political discourse and he thought that it always shared two problems in particular the first he writes is staleness of imagery the other is lack of precision let's talk first about staleness of imagery one of the most helpful ways to convey a message is to use metaphor and simile creating

unique mental images to illustrate a point orwell quotes ecclesiastes as an example of brilliant use of imagery i returned and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong neither yet bred to the wise nor yet riches to men of understanding nor yet favor to men of skill but time and chance happeneth to them all a beautiful way i think you'll agree to express the idea that luck rather than skill is often the reason why people are successful and to show what so often goes wrong in

modern writing orwell translates this passage into what he calls modern english of the worst sort 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 this says the same thing as the original biblical passage but it's far more stale far less eloquent and indeed far less convincing than the original why because it's a circus of unnecessarily complex words which are completely devoid of imagery in an attempt to feign

sophistication though the same point is made the lack of imagery of bread to the wise and riches to men of understanding is lost and it's exactly this kind of imagery that makes ecclesiastes such an eloquent book orwell's second complaint you'll remember is lack of precision this is something we can find all over modern writing and speaking in politics consider how instead of saying i made a mistake politicians will often say something more like undeniably departmental mistakes were made in the process of decision making which will be addressed as a matter of urgency or perhaps you

felt that nagging feeling that regardless of how many times an interviewer asks a question a politician just seems ludicrously incapable of giving what we might call a straight answer did you threaten to work i was not entitled to instruct derrick lewis and i did not instruct him to overrule the truth of the matter is that mr marriott was not suspended i did not overrule him i did not overrule derek did you threaten to overrule i took advice on what i could or could not did you threatened i overruled him in accordance with that advice i

did not overrule that did you threaten to mr marriott was not suspended did you threaten to overrule him i have a character i'm going to be rightfully rude but yes i'm sorry the defining quality of such speech is as orwell says lack of precision i would add that this kind of writing and speaking also extends to academia especially i hate to have to say it in the humanities the social sciences in particular are often accused of containing large swaths of essentially meaningless words strung mindlessly together here's a sometimes cited example of a single sentence from

an essay by the philosopher judith butler the move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition convergence and re-articulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure and marked a shift from a form of alpha-sarian theory that takes structural tonalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the re-articulation of

power how very insightful this meaningless verbiage by a professor at berkeley was actually published in a real scholarly journal and i think is exactly the kind of writing that would have made george orwell start to uncontrollably vomit luckily though orwell has helpfully specified four things to avoid in your own writing and speaking in order to prevent the kind of unclarity that we've seen in these examples four things to resist in particular and here they are first dying metaphors genuinely fresh metaphors are a crucial tool evoking a visual image to help make a point orwell compares

these with dead metaphors those which have been so overused that they actually cease to be metaphors altogether and instead begin to function like ordinary words consider referring to something as brand new what does this mean brand new originally this referred to a brand or firebrand implying the immediate newness of something just forged in a fire saying brand new thus evoked an image one that simply isn't evoked anymore now it's just a plain phrase functioning like any other ordinary word to be clear dead metaphors like brand new are fine to use specifically because they are dead

they now function like ordinary words what we should avoid according to orwell is not dead metaphors but dying metaphors somewhere between alive and dead no longer fresh enough to be insightful but not quite dead enough to function as a common word these are metaphors that someone somewhere cleverly devised a long time ago but have now passed into common parlance meaning that they no longer strike the reader or listener as interesting orwell's own examples of dying metaphors are of course a bit dated being from the 40s but one of the examples he gave was the phrase

stand shoulder to shoulder with such a metaphor is unoriginal and overused and is perhaps best described as a cliche it's boring your eyes or ears gloss over it without it having the evocative effect that was originally intended when a country's leader boldly states that we will stand shoulder to shoulder with our allies the sentence isn't nearly as powerful as it would have been when such a metaphor was genuinely original now it's just quite boring and common to hear another example orwell gives is toe the line when you hear this phrase do you imagine people standing

alongside each other at the beginning of a foot race probably not orwell notes that in this case the original imagery has become so lost that this phrase is often even distorted into toe the line with a w the imagery is stale the meaning forgotten and the metaphor is dying i think that some modern examples of dying metaphors might include a rule of thumb or skating on thin ice dying metaphors are says orwell merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves the effect is that modern writing quote does not consist in

picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer it consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else and making the results presentable by sheer humbug so stop using dying metaphors that someone else came up with and everyone else uses try some new ones all of your own this will make your writing far more interesting second is what orwell calls operators or verbal false limbs he phrases this a bit weirdly but this one is essentially an issue

of economy instead of using the perfectly good word break a person may write render inoperative instead of saying fight they might say militate against orwell describes this kind of language as turning a verb into a whole phrase when it's unnecessary to do so other examples he gives include be subjected to play a leading part in and exhibit a tendency to such phrases may sound sophisticated but when going for clarity orwell thinks that we should always use one word instead of many whenever we can i myself for what it's worth i'm not sure that i agree

with orwell here i think this kind of writing is okay so long as clarity is not hindered by a little bit of verbal dressing orwell also notes in this section something which today we can recognize as an obsession of politicians which is speaking in the passive rather than the active voice this is the difference between saying i made a mistake which is active and mistakes were made which is passive a subtle distinction but when the passive voice is overused it renders a speech completely detached and impersonal so orwell thinks that wherever possible we should be

using the active voice rather than the passive thirdly in this section orwell advises against the not unformation saying something like not uncommonly instead of the far easier commonly when criticized a politician won't say the claims are founded but rather the claims are not unfounded this allows the speaker or writer to disguise uncomfortable admissions in ambiguous phrasing and something that for the sake of clarity we ought to avoid so always prioritize clarity and don't use more words when less will do this is orwell's second piece of advice to you third pretentious diction of course this will

depend on the context but frankly try not to be pretentious and before you run to the comments to call me a pretentious hypocrite bear in mind that orwell is talking here about literally putting up a pretense using words inappropriately or falsely for example orwell resents how words like objective or categorical are quote used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments consider for example when someone claims that we need to follow the science when in a lot of arguments a person is really advocating for a biased personal

judgment an interpretation of data not some objective scientific fact yet they will still label their views as objective in an attempt to sound impartial orwell continues by noting that when writing about international politics we say things like epoch making historic inevitable and unprecedented when oftentimes the subject matter is in fact not any of these things when talking about war and keep in mind that this essay was published just after world war ii writing takes on an archaic color according to orwell using words like realm and trident sword and shield and jack boot in an even

more egregious pretense we might refer to a war as an intervention or an invasion as an operation orwell also uses this section to advise against unnecessarily using foreign words where english ones will do i should add this obviously only applies when you're actually writing in english orwell cites phrases like cul-de-sac and status quo as being pretentious but again these are dated examples since nowadays these are actually extremely common staples of very much non-pretentious english discourse orwell isn't against the use of foreign words of course our entire language has roots all over the globe but if

a foreign word is being used just for the sake of sounding fancy or scientific when there's actually a perfectly good commonly used alternative in the english language that's just a bit annoying i think you'll agree but i do have a feeling that orwell would agree with my stipulation here which is that in many cases in my view there are foreign words whose specific meaning has no direct translation and is therefore best left untouched but again orwell's key advice here is to avoid vagueness fourth meaningless words okay this seems a bit obvious of course we don't

want to use meaningless words but orwell is specifically advising against using words that don't have a specific definition using words that can mean something completely different to different listeners without actually specifying what you intend it to mean here's a quote from his essay the word fascism has now no meaning except insofar as it signifies something not desirable the words democracy socialism freedom patriotic realistic justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another in the case of a word like democracy not only is there no agreed definition but the attempt

to make one is resisted from all sides it's almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning how very relatable orwell also notes that many people use such words in a deliberately dishonest way relying on the ambiguity in their definition to make claims which they can defend as honest because they did mean what they said but that they

know are misleading imagine a priest saying the catholic church is opposed to persecution okay sure but we clearly just have different definitions of what counts as persecution another of orwell's examples the soviet press is the freest in the world okay fine but i have a feeling that you've got a slightly more paternalistic conception of what freedom means than i do the same thing of course happens in politics all the time when a politician says i would never do anything to harm the country they kind of beg the question as to what harming the country means

in the first place of course what they're doing is something that they don't think is going to harm the country but the whole argument is whether the thing they're doing is harmful at all so the definition of harmful is something that needs to be specified in order for the sentence to even make sense if these words are not strictly defined then they are in a sense meaningless they have no unifying meaning this is exactly how we end up with the united states the netherlands and north korea all claiming to be democratic similarly if a traditionalist

community is accused of misogyny they might say no no we care deeply for the welfare of our women i don't doubt that they genuinely do but they probably have a different idea of what a woman's welfare consists in unless we specify precisely what it is that we're actually talking about we will always run into avoidable ambiguities so then the way to avoid meaningless words is to precisely define what it is that you're talking about wherever you suspect that there might be some potential ambiguity these then are all wells four things to avoid dying metaphors false

verbal limbs pretentious diction and meaningless words helpfully orwell condenses his points into six easy-to-follow rules whenever you're writing an essay or speech one never use a metaphor simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print two never use a long word where a short one will do three if it is possible to cut out a word always cut it out four never use the passive where you can use the active five never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday english

equivalent and six perhaps most importantly break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous i've already mentioned that i personally distrust some of the advice that orwell gives in this essay but that final rule of his seems to recognize that there is some scope for legitimate disagreement about the points that he raises i would highly recommend reading it for yourself i'll leave a link in the description but just bear in mind if you do read it that it was written in the 40s and so the examples may seem a bit nonsensical to the

modern reader but you can easily fill in examples of your own reading politics and the english language i get the impression that i myself have a bit more admiration for shall we say flair and linguistic indulgence than orwell did but then i'm not really a political writer as orwell was and whenever i'm aiming at perfect clarity i'm much more likely to follow his rules at any rate we can be sure that the people i quoted at the beginning of this video could certainly have done with listening to mr eric blair by heeding his warnings we

might be able to protect our language against a decline in clarity and meaning something he warned us about most extremely with 1984 and given that orwell's writing is still today a staple of our culture he must have been getting something right now there is something else that orwell himself never wrote about protecting because he died before it existed but i like to think that if he were still alive he'd care about it too and that something is your internet security that's right i want to take a moment to thank expressvpn for sponsoring today's video expressvpn

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