George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)
Orwell's advice on how to write better English is at best naively harmfully, and at worst cravenly hypocritical. He never followed his own "rules", why in the hell should anyone else? Answer: because his rules are self-serving bullshit.<p>Case in point: Orwell uses passive constructions 40% more frequently than than an average English corpus. This essay is full of them. Language Log did a brilliant analysis of the essay's towering inaccuracy and hypocrisy:<p><a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992" rel="nofollow">http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=992</a><p>---<p>If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.<p>And wouldn't you know it, the very first sentence of Orwell's essay runs:<p>Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.<p>---<p>His rules are bullshit, and he knew it, which is why he was smart enough to ignore them completely.