George Orwell. AP photo.
George Orwell was as important to language as he was to
ideas.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the death
of perhaps the most influential English writer of the 20th
century, Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell.
Orwell died at the peak of his career, with the sales of his
most famous novel, Nineteen Eighty Four (he always
spelled out the title), published in June 1949, breaking
records.
That book and Animal Farm, published four years
earlier, have sold more than 11 million copies each and
continue to sell today.
They made Orwell rich and famous, while contributing
memorable phrases to the English language: "Big Brother",
"Newspeak", "All animals are equal, but some are more equal
than others".
While most people know Orwell from these two books of unusual
imagination, he was an amazingly prolific writer.
In less than 20 years, he wrote six novels, four documentary
studies and hundreds of essays.
One of his essays, "Shooting an Elephant", has become a
classic studied in high school and college English texts, not
only for its style, but because it is a powerful,
unforgettable indictment of the evils of imperialism.
Orwell's greatest influence beyond his two classic novels was
as a prose stylist.
Along with Ernest Hemingway, he probably influenced the
writing of prose more than anyone else in the first half of
the 20th century.
He developed a crisp, clear literary style that immediately
and directly seized the reader's attention.
There were no frills; every word was carefully chosen for its
effect.
"Good prose is like a windowpane," he wrote.
"It hides nothing."
In another influential essay, "Politics and the English
Language", he formulated six rules of good writing that are
commonsensical:
• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech
that you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word when a short word will do.
• If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out.
• Use the active rather than passive voice.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon
word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
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