Comms as a Craft Part 1: Lessons from Orwell

This is the first of a short series of posts exploring communications as both a craft and a tool. My perspective is that understanding the role communications plays in our present age is vital if we are to build effective tools of resistance.

Twenty years ago I got a BFA with a major in Drawing. Drawing was an interdisciplinary stream that suited my asynchronous inclinations. I wanted to do everything—digital media, animation, sculpture, sound, painting, etc etc, and the Drawing department accommodated those sprawling ambitions. 

I excelled in my liberal studies classes and legitimately enjoyed essay writing. I can still remember the moment essay structure fundamentals gelled and I realized information organized in a certain way could validate thought and compel understanding. I remember when the rule of threes became clear in my mind and I began to understand why three entities listed together resulted in more effective impact (and how quickly that trick could become a crutch). 

The biggest influence on my formative communications journey was a small paperback I found at a used bookstore titled a collection of ESSAYS by GEORGE ORWELL Author of 1984, first published in 1946. I picked it up because as a liberal studies student "Orwell = important", but I wasn't prepared for how big a crush I would form on the man himself after absorbing his gripes and opinions. The essay that not only permanently corrected my writerly course, but deeply influenced my critical comms abilities was Politics and the English Language. The essay was a grumbling, semi-philosophical rant on the weaknesses of written communications at the time. It all rang true when I read it in 2006, and his cranky prose evolved into a fundamental framework that guided my entire communications career. 

The first light was lit with Orwell's complaints on "dying metaphors":

"A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between those two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves." 

He had me at "huge dump of". He then goes on to list several clichéd expressions of the time, his annoyance at the misuse of certain metaphors (ie: "toe the line" vs "tow the line") and gripes, "a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would be aware of this, and would avoid perverting the original phrase". Yaaas George!

He also points out "operators or verbal false limbs", bemoaning, "these save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry". As a young college student juggling essay assignments with word count requirements, this advice was potent. The directive stop turning verbs into phrases was cemented in my mind.

This plus his irritations with "pretentious diction", "meaningless words" , jargon words, ie: words that "do not point to any discoverable object"—he even skewers the word "fascism", saying it "now has no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable", and likewise "democracy" saying "not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides".

The whole essay is just so deliciously irritated. Orwell huffs:

"As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their 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 someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug." 

BY SHEER HUMBUG. Hello ChatGPT.

"If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious." 

I still think of this anytime I'm watching a show and can "hear the script"—an uninventive writer imbues an uninventive stank on everything they create. It also affirms that "hunting for words" is a legitimate part of being a writer! You don't have to have all the words banked and at-the-ready. Open the damn thesaurus and don't feel guilty about it.

Orwell instructs writers to ask themselves these questions: "What am I trying to say?", "What words will express it?", "What image or idiom will make it clearer?", "Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?", "Could I put it more shortly?", "Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?". 

And what really convinced my 26-year-old self I could've been besties with young Georgie was when he insisted that the defence of the English language had "nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax"—yes bae sing it! He was more concerned with "the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness" and "using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning". He insisted, "in prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender them." 

He concludes the essay by laying out some firm rules:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say something outright barbarous. 

The essay ends with a gentleness that contrasts his irritations, urging against "political quietism" that vague ideological nouns like "fascism" and "democracy" tend to generate (remember, he was forming these ideas during WWII), citing the example of a prominent political voice of the time amplifying views like, "since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism?" Orwell balks, urging:

"One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.

...Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservative to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase—some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse, into the dustbin where it belongs." 

His next essay that follows immediately is titled Reflections on Gandhi, and opens with, "Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent..." Orwell, my beautiful boy.

The lesson I took away from Orwell's essays and, to an extent, his larger body of work was that if I wanted to communicate clearly and with potency, it was imperative to avoid clichés and trends of expression. It also helped me see though campaigns, headlines, and narratives that intentionally forwarded or preyed on over-worn sentiment. With Orwell's irritated criticisms echoing in the back of my mind, I was empowered to see language for the tool that it was.

This phase of my education in communications was then extended by the work of Marshall McLuhan, a midcentury media philosopher whose work remains deeply relevant to our current online age. My next post will highlight how urgently McLuhan's theories apply to the present state of Western communications.