George Orwell, on the heels of publishing Animal Farm and various autobiographical essays, published “Politics and the English Language“.  The essay is still being used in writing courses everywhere as a loud voice railing against predictable and unimaginative writing.

In the essay, Orwell makes several remarks of note but his thesis is clear:

“Now it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.  But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.” (par. 2)

Writing the article in 1946, after seeing the horrors of WW2, Orwell understood the power of language to reach a political agenda.  The article has political leanings, but there are also parts of the essay that speak…