For one page respond to
Orwell's essay, taking great care to acknowledge his discussion in terms of
your own experience as a writer both inside, and outside of our class. Does
Orwell's essay generate resentment? How does the essay augment how you feel
about assessment? Discuss the assignments you've done in 214.
I found Orwell’s
essay really interesting and tend to agree with most of his points. I used to
write for a newspaper years ago, which taught me to use a very different style of
writing than what we do in this class or in college in general. Newswriting is
all about getting the maximum amount of information to the reader in the smallest
amount of words. I would like to hope that some of these habits have stuck with
me as a writer, but after reviewing some of my work from this class, I found plenty
of examples of what Orwell thought of as “bad” writing.
Orwell
himself worked as a journalist before becoming a prose author. The emphasis on
precise and brief passages that newswriting employs to get its message across
must have influenced his later writing. That work also must have given him an ear
for politicians bullshitting and their habit of using long stretches of words
to make it seem like they’re answering a question while really saying nothing
of significance.
Now the most important politician
in the country is praised by some for using terminology that the typical
working man can understand. You might think that would make Trump’s speeches “good”
by Orwell’s standards. But Orwell addresses this too, writing that good writing
is “not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English
colloquial” and in his five rules at the end of the essay says that we shouldn’t
oversimplify so that we “say anything outright barbarous.”
Knowing your audience is something
that I struggle with in other classes, in the sense that I feel academic
writing has a certain expectation that we use jargon and “big words” to get
meaning across. This relates to the fear of oversimplification to the point of
being “barbarous.” I find myself using overly complex sentence construction, or
reaching for a thesaurus to find a “cooler” or more exotic word for something
that could be put simply. Orwell seems to find these tactics lazy, since coming
up with a creative yet simple way to get a point across is a lot harder than
using a big compound word or hackneyed but highfalutin phrase that you see
other academic writers resorting to. They sound smart when they write, so if I do
the same thing they do, won’t I sound smart too? When it gets really bad, I feel
like a phony, and that my writing is inauthentic, but that this is what is expected
of me as an essay writer.
I saw many examples of “bad”
writing in work for this class. One of the first things I noticed is that I
used “schadenfreude” in an op-ed. Even at the moment I thought to myself, “This
sucks,” but I was pressed for time so I went on with writing. Taking three
minutes to think of something better than this pretentious German word would
have made this piece of writing much more authentic to my own voice. I also spotted
some mixed metaphors that make no real sense if you think about them but sound
kind of nice. I certainly used cliched phrases.
I do not resent the advice given in
this essay. Part of newswriting is also receiving feedback from editors.
Sometimes this feedback can be brutal – if something you write sucks, you
should be told it does, because your writing reflects the paper as a whole.
Putting out a good written product is what you get paid for. Because of that
experience I love giving and receiving honest constructive feedback on writing.
Good writing is very hard because
simplicity and clarity of writing actually takes a lot more time. It’s all
about re-reading, revising, throwing out phrases and trying something
different, putting yourself in the reader’s position and getting out of your
own head. If I were to take the time to think of Orwell’s five rules for good
writing that he puts down toward the end of his essay every time I revised a
piece of writing I’m sure my work would improve drastically.
