Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
In these essays, Orwell’s essential message is that clear writing is a product of clear thinking, and, conversely, often muddled writing is a consequence of muddled thinking, so it’s a great plea for clarity of thought allied to clarity of expression. My favourite is ‘Politics and the English Language’, quite a short four- or five-thousand-word essay he wrote in the mid-1940s, in which he deplores the slovenliness of quite a lot of political writing and journalism.
Your first recommendation is The Penguin Essays of George Orwell. Should we still be reading them to understand our politics when the context must be so different now?
George Orwell was not only an extraordinary writer but he also hated any form of cant. Some of his most widely read works such as 1984 and Animal Farm are an assault on the nastier, narrow-minded, dictatorial tendencies of the left, although Orwell was himself on the left.
In these essays, his essential message is that clear writing is a product of clear thinking, and, conversely, often muddled writing is a consequence of muddled thinking, so it’s a great plea for clarity of thought allied to clarity of expression. He writes about the decline of the English murder, watching a hanging out in Burma and, in my favourite, which is called ‘Politics and the English Language’, quite a short four- or five-thousand-word essay he wrote in the mid-1940s, he deplores the slovenliness of quite a lot of political writing and journalism. He goes through some real examples. Over the years when any youngster has asked me about becoming a journalist, I say, ‘Read “Politics and the English Language”. If you absorb that and take the advice you are halfway there.’
How much of his polemical theme still rings true today?
Fundamentally, it still rings true. For example, in the novel Coming Up for Air, which he wrote just before the Second World War, there is an account of a left-wing meeting. The issues were different – Hitler and Stalin – but the description of the meeting, the sloganising, the emptiness of it, and his passion for saying to those of us on the left, ‘Let’s do better than this’, that is as relevant as it was several generations ago.
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Peter Kellner has been a political analyst, commentator and columnist for the past 30 years, and is now president of the internet panel polling company YouGov, which floated for £18 million in 2005 and has profit margins far higher than most of the market research industry. He is a long-term member of the Labour Party, but YouGov polls, which electronically survey invited participants, have been criticised by Labour politicians – possibly because the findings are thought to have broken a pattern in which traditional polls in the UK tend to overstate Labour support.
