Why I Write By George Orwell Summary

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George Orwell had a very unique writing style. His passage “Politics and the English Language” in his book “Why I Write” explain how to “avoid ugliness” in ones’ writing. Orwell writes about four ways to identify these pre-constructed passages or phrases. The four ways are Dying Metaphors, Operators or verbal false limbs, Pretentious diction, and Meaningless words. Dying Metaphors are prefabricated metaphors that have been used many times in many different contexts. It can also be metaphors that have been switched from their original meaning without the person using them even knowing. An example given by Orwell of such is the phrase “toe the line” is sometimes written as “tow the line”. Operators or verbal false limbs is defined by Orwell as …show more content…
The first thing I noticed about this article is that the author used the word “Ally” in the title to give the reader a sense of his own personal opinion. Orwell, I believe would have replaced the world Ally to a simpler word like, supporter. In the first paragraph the author states “Eric Schmidt has enjoyed virtual open door access to the white house…. Not counting large meetings and social events like state dinners.”, the word “enjoyed” can be removed because it is a meaningless word that is used as filler to give the reader a feeling that Eric Schmidt was happy to have access to all white house events. According to Orwell the author can remove enjoyed and change has to had. This will make the sentence less bias towards Eric Schmidt also. In the same sentence it is stated “not counting large meetings and social events like state dinners.”, this is a redundant statement for as we do not need to know that he also attended these events. The sentence will then read “Eric Schmidt had virtual open door access to the white house during the Obama administration, records show, meeting with the US president and top White House officials on at least 18 separate occasions from 2009 to 2015.” The corrections were made using the using the four ways to identify bad writing stated in Orwells book “Why I

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