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Orwell's Six Rules for Writing

George Orwell gave his six rules for writing near the end of “Politics and the English Language,” an essay published in 1946. Taken alone, the rules look like a compact style guide. The essay makes a larger argument: vague, imitative language weakens thought, while political writers can use that weakness to conceal what they mean.1

Orwell starts from a feedback loop. Foolish thought makes language “ugly and inaccurate,” and careless language then makes foolish thought easier. He rejects the idea that this decline is inevitable. Writers spread bad habits by imitation, so writers can also choose to stop using them.

The habits he opposed

Orwell groups the prose he dislikes into four broad faults:

  • Dying metaphors are familiar images repeated after they have lost their power to make a reader see anything. Mixed metaphors reveal that the writer has stopped attending to the images behind the words.
  • Operators, or verbal false limbs, replace direct verbs with padded phrases. Make contact with displaces contact, for example, while passive constructions and abstract nouns hide who did what.
  • Pretentious diction uses inflated, foreign, or scientific-sounding words to dress up ordinary claims and lend biased judgments an air of authority.
  • Meaningless words carry approval or disapproval without a stable, shared meaning. Orwell singles out political terms whose ambiguity lets different speakers claim the same flattering label for incompatible ideas.1

His parody of Ecclesiastes shows these faults working together. Concrete images of a race, a battle, bread, and wealth become “success or failure in competitive activities.” The inflated version has fewer words but more syllables and conveys less. For Orwell, brevity alone is not enough. The words must preserve the thought's precise details.

The political consequence is euphemism. A writer who cannot plainly defend imprisonment, bombing, or forced removal reaches for phrases such as pacification and transfer of population. Abstract nouns and passive voice remove the people, acts, and injuries from the sentence. Orwell's claim is that insincere politics needs this cloudy style because a concrete description would expose the gap between the act and its defense.

The six rules

Orwell offers rules to use “when instinct fails”:

  1. “Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.”
  2. “Never use a long word where a short one will do.”
  3. “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.”
  4. “Never use the passive where you can use the active.”
  5. “Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.”
  6. “Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.”1

The sixth rule controls the other five. Orwell is not demanding short words, active voice, and literal language in every sentence. He explicitly says that his defense of English is not about enforcing archaic “standard English,” banning American usage, or making all prose colloquial. Grammar matters less than making the meaning clear. A necessary technical term is better than an inaccurate everyday substitute, and a fitting passive sentence is better than an awkward active one.

The rules instead interrupt automatic writing. A familiar metaphor or ready-made phrase can assemble a sentence before the writer has decided exactly what to say. Orwell asks the writer to begin with the intended meaning, choose words for that meaning, and then consider what those words will make another person understand.

Before presenting the six rules, he gives six useful questions for revising a sentence:

  1. What am I trying to say?
  2. What words will express it?
  3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?
  4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
  5. Could I put it more shortly?
  6. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?1

These questions explain the rules better than a mechanical lint check can. They test whether the writer has made conscious choices. Orwell admits that a person can obey every rule and still write badly. What the rules prevent is prose assembled from stale phrases that blur, decorate, or conceal its subject.

References

  1. George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”, 1946. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4