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. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy.
--George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946
It’s funny that vague, large, multi-syllabic academic terms are prized as sophisticated. It’s funny that these terms are elevated above the ordinary, vivid, concrete terms of plain speech. When you really think about it, it’s harder to write in plain, concrete terms. It requires more effort of the writer to capture the images in his mind on paper—and will we not admit that writing one can see is more clear? Such writing is easier to understand.
And yet concrete language is looked down upon in academic composition. However, I am convinced a writer ceases to be conscious if he churns out some of the mechanical sentences I’ve seen in textbooks and academic writing.
Now this is really something to take into consideration. What counts as good writing? Is it not writing that is clear? Writing that is sharp? Vivid? Of course writing must adjust to do a certain job, such as prove a thesis or explain a new software. But in all contexts, wouldn’t you say that good writing actually makes sense? And yet we do not draw this conclusion if academic writing or textbook writing is our sample.
In the case of academic writing, it appears that prized writing does not really say anything at all. It does not spark the brain cells, but rather lulls them to sleep. It rather seeps into the mind and eventually begins to rule readers’ vocabulary so that they no longer know what they are saying either.
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