Enhancing Your Writing

I didn't know if I would learn anything useful from my environmental studies class, but from the first reading, I picked up a few pointers. The course is enviornmental writing, which focuses on literature surrounding the environment. Pretty self explanatory. The reading, written by George Orwell titled Politics and the English Language, talks about the overuse of idioms that make writers sound like idiots. Here are his tips for all you readers who are also bloggers yourselves.

Orwell gives an example of how modern writers complicate their writing with huge words that either confuse the readers or fail to deliver its intended message clearly. He quotes a passage from the Bible and gives a modernized version of it.

Ecclesiastes:
"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not 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."

His modern (exaggerated) version:
"Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels 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."

You might have had to reread the second passage to get the meaning, or maybe that was just me. But clearly, the first passage is much more simple and straight to the point. Using a vocabulary of multi-syllable words does not make you a better writer. You look like you're trying to be smart, and by doing so you prove to the readers you're not.

When writing each sentence, Orwell advises his readers to ask the following questions:

What am I trying to say?

What words will express it?

What image or idiom will make it clearer?

Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

Could I put it more shortly?

Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

In addition, one should also keep the following points in mind:

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

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

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

Never use the passive where you can use the active.

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

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

I'm now trying to write as simply as I can. If I ever get back to writing complicated stuff, let me know.

The ideas I have presented are not my own, so don't sue me for plagiarizism.

Soucre: Orwell, George. "Politics and the English Language." The Broadview Reader. 3rd edition. Editors Herbert Rosengarten and jane Flick. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1998. 21-33.