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Comment by hbex5 | Hacker News Reader

Orwell's advice on how to write better English is at best naively harmfully, and at worst cravenly hypocritical. He never followed his own "rules", why in the hell should anyone else? Answer: because his rules are self-serving bullshit.

Case in point: Orwell uses passive constructions 40% more frequently than than an average English corpus. This essay is full of them. Language Log did a brilliant analysis of the essay's towering inaccuracy and hypocrisy:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992

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

And wouldn't you know it, the very first sentence of Orwell's essay runs:

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.

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His rules are bullshit, and he knew it, which is why he was smart enough to ignore them completely.

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He didn't ignore them completely. Orwell's writing is famously lucid. He could have used orotund obfuscations and otiose circumlocutions far more than he did, but he chose not to.

There's a difference between grammatical correctness, journalistic conciseness, and social register.

The "long" sentence is an example of the latter - it tells the reader something about the writer, and it uses stock cliches that make it more appealing to one particular social group.

Writing can be as much about social signalling and persuasion as plain content and grammar.

If you want to see English that completely fails to follow the rules, and is even more about social signalling than content, try this letter:

http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetarypolicy/Documents/pdf/...

I'm not sure how you're able to conclude that the guidelines are bullshit just because he himself fails to adhere strictly to them. All authors break their own guidelines from time to time.

I feel like this is something the HN audience should be familiar with. At least I personally know a lot of guidelines for creating maintainable software, but there are a host of conditions which will cause me to bypass them anyway.

The article itself basically says "I break these rules regularly, I'm not perfect either". But I think some people like to point out people's flaws to show off. Orwell's article is sincere.

Sounds cynical, but you're right. And people that like ti point out flaws in everything are "something the HN audience should be familiar with" :-)

Of course, you forgot the sixth rule:

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

So perhaps you could cut out the insults and bad language, it's only advice after all.

Well, it depends on your definition of barbarous is and how it compares to what his was :)

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