Politics and English language is an essay written by George Orwell. In this essay he criticizes ’’ugly and innacurate’’modern English especially written English. He says that language corrupts thought and vice versa. ’’ The slovenliness in the language allows for foolish thinking, and this foolish thinking allows for slovenliness in our language.’ When we read this essay, most of us think that Orwell is right and we should do what he suggests us and change the cycle. Then we realize that is not easy to do that, because the bad habits that we have in writing give us a convenient and beautiful sounding sentences. However, this process of English declining is reversible and Orwell has a remedy.
At the beginning of the essay, he goes on to cite some passages from different authors and then he criticizes those passages for their staleness of imagery and lack of precision. After that, he lists some tricks that the authors use and explains them. Dying metaphors, verbal false limbs, pretentious diction, Marxist writing and meaningless words. A written text carries significant info about the author’s knowledge, views, class, and inevitably his writing skills even if the author does not want to. By using jargons and such advanced literary figures of speech such as metaphors, one advertises his status, his knowledge, to unsuspecting readers, even if he used it incorrectly or inaptly. This is the reason English writing has become the way it is, i.e. a host of catch phrases, highbrow words, abstract idealisms, unnatural grammatical pedantry etc. It is also true that these decorative phraseologies are indeed a problem; however, they have been so ubiquitous as to become parts of the canonical English. Even the most donnish grammarians cannot say many of the “verbal false limbs’’ cited are problematic. In fact, a writing avoiding them will probably be unnatural.
The Review on A Stylistic Analysis of Business English Writings
A Stylistic Analysis of Business English Writings Liu Biao A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of B.A. in English Supervisor Yu Qiu SCHOOL OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES SOUTHWEST UNIVERSITY May 10, 2012 Acknowledgements My deepest gratitude goes first and foremost to Professor Yu Qiu, my supervisor, for her constant encouragement and guidance. She has helped me walk ...
I must find a way to consider this quote from the essay: “All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.’’
We know that man is a political creature. This is a statement, though, is less about man and more about politics. If you see your opinion as something that you need to explain and defend, then the language you use to do this is, by definition, political. Through this lens, I can accept that language used to discuss any issue, private, public, serious, or absurd, will be political in nature.
Orwell said that we have to let the meaning choose the word not the other way around. English writings can be set backwards by thinking clearly rather than thinking just to impress others and make the writing. Remarkable observation of Orwell was about the role of sincerity in writing. Sincerity is very important. To even begin clear writing, one must be sincere. However, this does not mean all writing must have such a state of mind. There are, to wit, poetry, satire, deliberate nonsense writings. Also noteworthy is that clear writing does not demand sincerity. For instance, one can write clearly with an intention to deceive. What is said here is that clarity comes with sincerity hand in hand, as a matter of expression with practicality so to speak. On the other hand, as the author puts it “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity” — an effective way of putting it than the literarily unimpressive: “To write clearly, one should be sincere”.
