As College students, we could all
learn a lot from Orwell’s essay. I think
that his main point is that many of us try to make our writing sound beautiful
and intelligent, however in doing so all we end up doing is confusing the
reader and ourselves. The message of
what you are writing gets lost, which should be the primary objective in
writing in the first place. Even as I am
writing this now, I am wondering to myself if I am doing the very things that
Orwell protests; and I probably am.
Interesting…
Orwell goes
on to discuss how this kind of “bad writing” is used frequently in politics and
namely political advertisements. In the
two separate ads discussing opposing views on the proposal 2 law, each side
uses fear to promote their ideas. The
first essentially implies that “if you say no to proposal 2, you won’t be saved
from a fire,” while the second implies that “if you say yes to proposal 2, your
kids will be killed by a school-bus driver and taught by a collection of
criminals.” We learn barely anything
about the real facts of proposal 2, what it is trying to accomplish, or the
basic arguments against it.
Contributing to this effect, some
of the diction in the advertisements are exactly what Orwell was talking about
in his essay. In the first ad, the term
“collective bargaining” is used frequently, but the term is never actually
explained! From the commercial, the
viewer assumes that proposition 2 is completely about this collective bargaining
thing, however in the second commercial, the term is not mentioned at all. As Orwell said, the ads use lofty words
tactics to promote their true objectives. At the end of the ad, the phrase “pray for
their safety” is used to scare parents.
These ads do not really explain anything about proposal 2 and are
exactly why Orwell says politics are perhaps the area in which the style of “modern
English” has become most evident.
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