🖋️Politics and the English Language

Bad writing and lazy thinking feed each other. When we reach for a phrase that is already assembled, the phrase does part of our thinking for us, and it does it badly: it hides what we mean from the reader and, worse, from ourselves. Because this is a habit and not a law of nature, it can be reversed one sentence at a time by anyone willing to ask what they are actually trying to say.

• Re-read on Saturday 15 November, the day after the no, a week after finishing Zinsser. I wanted prose with a spine in it.
• First read at university, when I took it as a set of rules. This time I read it as a description of a mechanism, which is better.
• Published in 1946. Under this vault's rule it counts as in copyright, so everything here is paraphrase, including the six rules.
• He is angrier than Zinsser and less kind, and his examples of bad writing are from professors and pamphlets I will never meet. The diagnosis travels anyway.
• I then opened the feedback document from Friday and counted the ready-made phrases in it. I stopped at nine and felt better, which was not the noble use of the essay.
• The quote filed here is not his. It is 🏛️ Francis Bacon's 💬 Reading maketh a full man, for the last clause: writing is what makes a person exact, and Orwell's whole complaint is prose that has stopped trying to be.
• Reaching for the ready-made phrase is 🧩 Satisficing in the bad sense. It is the first wording that clears the bar, taken before I have asked what the bar was.