Orwell

Orwell writes aggressively and confrontationally in "Politics and the English Language". He stresses the importance of clarity and attacks vagueness and abstractness as bullshit. He names the “swindles and perversions” (707) of modern writing. Through clear examples and a list of grievances and demands, he successfully convinced me of the sloppiness and laziness of this kind of uncareful writing.

Well, I don’t want to be a sloppy and imprecise writer. Anyone taking a class about close reading would probably make every effort to consciously form their language and meaning, or at least appear to do so. The very appeal of the class is in understanding the grammatical and stylistic scaffolding that structures prose. So Orwell puts us on the defensive, and even though we may agree with him, be fully persuaded by him, he has forced us to be hyper-aware of bullshit writing, and we seek it out in the very text we are reading, trying to be even more aware and knowledgeable than he is.

But Orwell knew we would do this. He criticizes the use of “dead metaphors”, and so we notice every time he uses any metaphor. He deliberately creates new ones that force us to question and visualize the comparison. Disguised aims are “cuttlefish squirting out ink” (710). When he writes that Latin words “fall… like soft snow” (710), he justifies it by explaining that they blur outlines and cover up details.

Near the end of the essay he throws in some “strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else” (708), such as “swallow such absurdities”, “on the other hand”, “above all”, “concrete object”. Yet once again he parries, challenging us to look back through his essay to find the very examples of which he writes, and admitting that “I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against” (711). To use a dead metaphor, Orwell has covered his ass and all the bases, which allows for occasional sloppiness since it is acknowledged and self-aware, and we are left noticing every unconscious word we speak, embarrassed to be pointed out as swindlers and perverts.