by Marc Wright

 

George Orwell was a master of writing style and how it could be used to evoke certain emotions in audiences. In his famous essay, "Politics And The English Language," written in 1946, he laid out 6 key rules that will guide you to better writing straight away. 

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 outright barbarous.

 

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

Newly created metaphors and similes are very powerful; they sum up in an image what could take a paragraph to describe.

For instance: “Our client retention strategy is about as useful as serving soup in a basket” is considerably more powerful than, “On the whole, looking back at the previous quarter’s sales compared with lost revenue from defaulting clients, shows that our retention ratios leave cause for concern.” The trouble is that, in business, we tend to fall between these two verbal stools and end up using metaphors that have lost their power, for example : “Client retention has fallen off a cliff,” and “Our Strategy has gone pear-shaped.”

The first few thousand times these metaphors were used, they evoked a mental picture; but now they pass through our brains without leaving a trace. So, when you are writing, ask yourself whether the language you are using is as fresh as a Spring croissant in a Parisian cafe or as stale as last-night’s take-away.

 

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

The longer the word, the more likely it has a Latin root. Latin was the language of politics, jurisdiction and management, whereas Anglo Saxon was the language of work and things. As a result, English tends to have two words or phrases to describe the same thing or activity. Where you have a choice, go for the Anglo Saxon since these words are grounded in everyday life and tend to be more meaningful to the listener.

 

Latinate	Anglo Saxon
Objective	Goal
Consult with	Ask
Develop	Build
Increase	Grow
Infrastructure	Works
Financial	Cash
Communicate	Talk
Strategy	Plan
Perceive	See

 

Use short Anglo Saxon phrases to emphasise the positive and lengthy Latinate words to decry the negative. To make the point, take a look at the following speeches.

 

Winston Churchill : “I say to the House as I said to ministers who have joined this government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many months of struggle and suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I say it is to wage war by land, sea and air. War, with all our might and with all the strength God has given us, and to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. Victory at all costs; Victory in spite of all terrors; Victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.”

Notice how all the exhorting words are anglo-saxon : "blood, toil, tears and sweat" wheras the enemy is described in long latinate phrases: "monstrous tyranny...lamentable catalogue".

Churchill was a professional writer as well as a politician and his use of language is always worth studying.  So too is the following orator.

 

Martin Luther King: I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream… I have a dream that one day, on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that, one day, even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice…. I have a dream today.”

 

 

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

Look at these phrases:

render inoperative = break

militate against = stop

make contact with = contact

be subjected to = suffer

give grounds for = make

have the effect of = effect

play a leading part/role = lead

make itself felt = makes

exhibit a tendency to = tends

serve the purpose of = serves

Verbal padding will make your sentences meaningless. This is because the eye skims over words that don’t need to be there so the reader assumes that the writer does not have much to say. Consequently, the more words you use, the more you dilute your message.

We use verbal padding to buy us time to think. It’s far better to spend time honing your writing down to the essentials. “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” This quote is so true that it has been attributed to numerous writers - Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, Pascal and others, as far back as Cicero.

 

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

Active language makes your emails, websites, scripts and copy more vibrant, accessible and memorable. Any sentence can be written in either a passive, or an active, form. To illustrate :

 

Passive

• “Service targets were broken this month by the Liverpool call centre.”

• “The practice of smoking in public places, such as pubs and restaurants, has been banned by the Irish courts.”

• “The new company identity is being implemented throughout the organisation’s many locations, in a programme led by the Marketing & Communications department.”

 

Active

• “The Liverpool call centre broke service targets this month.”

• “Irish courts have banned smoking in pubs and restaurants.”

• “Jane Smith and her team are rolling out the new identity, throughout the company’s 17 sites."

   

Active language is shorter, more to the point; and the person doing the action comes before the verb. School and college encourage us to use passive language – to appear more detached, objective and, well, academic. The trouble is that, when we take these writing styles to work, they muffle our prose and stifle the impact of our messages. Passive language puts people off your message – and perhaps to sleep.

 

Americans tend to use active vocabulary more than the British. You can see it in traffic signals: “Walk”, “Don’t Walk”; in advertising: “Just do it”; in film titles: “Jaws”; and in political rhetoric: “I love America!”.  It is a gutsier, more vibrant language style that grabs your attention.

English language, perfected and honed over the years, has developed byzantine constructs and lengthy sentence structures that reflect the British uneasiness with direct confrontation and instructions.  Although extremely elegant, corporate English became bureaucratic and opaque in the 18th and 19th centuries. This ‘officialese’ tends towards the Latinate – thanks to the Norman French, who administered both the English courts and the financial systems.

Active vocabulary uses the present tense and favours Anglo Saxon verbs that have impact, rather than Latinate words and passive structures.

For an example of active vocabulary, here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

“I returned and saw, under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

Here it is, translated by Orwell into what he calls the worst kind of modern English:

“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.”

Before we laugh, we have to admit that most corporate English is closer to Orwell’s nightmare example than to the poetry of Ecclesiastes.

 

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.  Communicating at work is a constant obstacle course of jargon and acronyms. Communication professionals are as bad as any group in using obscure language where everyday English will do.  Here is my favourite list of management jargon that You can use to play jargon bingo at your next meeting.

 

 

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Orwell’s sixth rule is to use common sense. Trust your own ear. If something you have written or said sounds heavy because you have followed his previous five rules, strike it out and start again.

 

 

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