George Orwell (Why I Write, pp110-113):
“I am going to translate a
passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a
well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned, and saw under the sun,
that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet
bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men
of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective consideration of
contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in
competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate
capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably
be taken into account.
The first sentence contains 49
words but only 60 syllables and all its words are those of everyday life. The
second contains 38 words of 90 syllables: 18 of its words are from Latin roots,
and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images and only one
phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains not
a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90 syllables it only
gives a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first.
Yet without a doubt it is the
second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want
to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of
simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still if you or
I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we
should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from
Ecclesiastes.
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in
picking out words for the sake of the meaning and inventing images in order to
make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words
which have already been set in order by somebody else, and making the results
presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it
is easy. It is easier - even quicker, once you have the habit - to say in my
opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think.”
If one attraction is that it’s easier,
another must be that it sounds clever, or learned.
And Orwell’s prescription:
“A scrupulous writer, in every
sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions: what am I
trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it
clearer? Is the image fresh enough to have an effect? and he will probably ask
himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is
avoidably ugly?”