Orwell’s Language (Bonus)—Lily Caswell

 As someone who is an avid reader, I would love to be a great writer. Alas, I’m not. I am working on it though. I feel like my worst mistake in writing is that it’s a lot of fat and not a lot of literary meat, and I have a tendency to use pretentious diction and meaningless words, which Orwell very ardently argues against, especially regarding politicians. I think it’s quite obvious today that politicians are very good at persuasive speech and hiding their true intentions behind a lot of fanciful words and “is designed to make lies sound truthful…” (Orwell). I have a special fondness for Orwell’s writing (I know I have yet to read 1984 but it’s gonna get read over the summer, I promise) and I like that even though Orwell argues against all of these bad writing habits, he still gives us a way out by changing our habits over time.

Blogger is not working for comments so here they are…

Emory: Good post, Emory. I definitely agree when you say that if writing is hard to understand, it is easy to deceive. It has to be skimmable.


Bug: I love how you refer to Orwell’s 1984. The truth hasn’t been the truth in a long time and that affects people more than we think it does.

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