Quote:
Originally posted by taxwonk
I cannot believe that you, with all your rants on legalese and the way lawyers torture the truth, do not recognize that simplicity in language is a cornerstone of speaking the truth.
Hemingway, Burroughs, John D. McDonald. All these writers and others express themselves with directness and simplicty.
Even politicians, sometimes, embrace this in their communication. Can anyone deny that, whatever else you think of Ronald Reagan, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" is one of the most memorable and enduring quotes of the 20th century?
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You're mixing apples and oranges here, Wonk. Simple language is a hallmark of the truth, but its not necessarily a hallmark of interesting writing. I love Vonnegut and he wrote as simply as one could. He also wrote wild fiction. You can have simple prose in fiction, non-fiction, journalism, etc. And in each of those areas, you can also have poetic prose. Orwell fails to distinguish between the art of writing prose and what he sees as poor, opaque use of language. When writing a simple essay or legal papers, simple writing is good. But when writing something for the reader's enjoyment and entertainment, the "poetic value" of numerous literary tricks and interesting flow or language is important. There's a distinction between "poorly written" and "not written as simply as it could have been."
And for somebody as intellectually pretentious as Orwell to suggest his prose is anything approaching simple is a bad joke. He writes in a deliberately snotty style recently cribbed by Hitchens. I love reading Hitchens and I never think "Wow, this guy should write in a simpler fashion." That would destory the beauty of his work, which to me lies in the prose. But YMMV. Most people fixate on the message, and if that's what Orwell is suggesting we should do, in a simple way, then I'd suiggest, were he alive, he take some of his own medicine before penning anything as dense as that fucking essay.
