Why I Write George Orwell

Orwell addresses political writing as a form of the writer giving a viewpoint of an event to an audience by using direct language to give an image to an audience. In his collected essay, “Why I Write,” Orwell mentions the fact that all background information that he writes is because he believes that it is not possible for you to “assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development,” emphasizing the idea that writers use an emotional attachment to their writings. Political writing is a sense of direction for the audience of the writer that he is expressing his feelings to in order to show off a more biased viewpoint towards a goal or motive. An example of this is used by Orwell himself, where he gives a starting point
for himself when writing book, saying, “I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention…” giving us that behind-the-scene viewpoint of a political writer’s mind. He continues on saying, “The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or her inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not,” giving the realization that political writing is merely a “mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence” in order to bring forth a viewpoint.
However, he gives a reasoning to why he believes political writing causes a problem, and how difficult it is to create such artistic views merely because it ruins the form of good, proper language in order to create untruthfulness. He then goes on saying, “…I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited…” showing how wording used throughout an author’s book can leave a spiritual, and even physical, scar because one who writes, is one that continuously struggles to face their own problems. Orwell goes on saying, “… I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose…” which gives a clear inclination of what writers need when it comes to a political piece of writing. Writers need to have a purpose to write, whether it is about a view on society, or a lie in general. Without the proper purpose, the persuasive argument that they want to display to the audience has no effect because it does not make sense.
Moving on to Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” he argues that the English language is “ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts,” which he then gives examples of.
To illustrate his point, Orwell uses writings from two professors, an essay on psychology in politics, a communist pamphlet, and a letter in Tribune, all of which consisting of two common faults: staleness of imagery and lack of precision. He states that political writing is indeed bad writing, creating a generalization for us to understand that speeches made by politicians are never “fresh, vivid, home-made…” speeches. What is intriguing, is that having a politically based, homemade speech, gives the speaker a distant presence in his speaking. He gives the depiction that those who read political based work, knows that it is not the true feelings of himself, but of the one who wrote the speech. The different uses of pretentious diction, meaningless words, dying metaphors, and operators, or verbal false limbs, allows the writer to dictate what the audience is able to comprehend in the writing. The writer could use jargon, misused words, and overall misinterpreted connotation, to manipulate reader’s understanding, potentially allowing readers to be deceived by the author without them even
knowing.
Lastly, Orwell states that forms of political writings are written in order to create a more unclear understanding of details within writing. The idea of euphemism is one used in order hide the more detailed occurrence of something that is going on between the words of speech. One example of this is, “…transfer of population or rectification of frontiers,” where if no one knew the true meaning of the statement, they would be blinded by the details of excess words. Orwell defines political writing as a form of politics that is “a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia,” causing corruption to everyone’s thoughts, even those who know better. It is something that cannot be changed quickly, but one must realize that it is designed to “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”