Advanced Module C: The Craft of Writing

Student Booklet – Term 2

Discursive and Persuasive Writing

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Persuasive Essay – George Orwell, ‘Politics and the

English Language ……..

- About the Author ……..

- About the Essay ……..
- Key Elements for Exploration and Emulation ……..
- Lesson 1 ……..
- Lesson 2 ……..
- ……..
- ……..
- ……..
……..
Discursive Essay – Zadie Smith, ‘That Crafty Feeling’
……..
- About the Author ……..
- About the Story ……..
- Key Elements for Exploration and Emulation ……..
- Lesson X ……..
- Lesson X ……..
- Lesson X ……..
……..

……..
- Lesson X ……..

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 Persuasive Essay:
George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’

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About the author
Born Eric Arthur Blair to poor but snobbish parents, the
young Orwell was pushed academically from an early age in
the hope of improving his family’s social status. Accordingly,
he won a scholarship to Eton College, where he spent four
unhappy years (1917-1921) being bullied and belittled by the
children of Britain’s wealthy elite. This experience shaped
his lifelong rebellious streak and instilled a deep hostility to
class distinction, moneyed privilege and authoritarian
attitudes. He did not attend university and initially pursued a
career in the Imperial police in Burma. He soon came to
loathe the hypocrisy of Britain’s ‘civilising mission’ and his
role in the oppression of the Burmese. In 1927, he resigned
out of shame.

Vowing to become a writer, Blair returned to England. Rejecting bourgeois materialism

and middle-class comfort, he embraced a life of poverty and reinvented himself as
‘George Orwell’, radical journalist and social-realist novelist. During the late 1920s and
early 1930s, he lived hand-to-mouth as a dishwasher, agricultural labourer and homeless
tramp. His first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, was a vivid memoir of this
destitution which confronted middle-class readers with the harsh facts of social inequality.
A later work, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) recounted Orwell’s observations of poverty
and unemployment in England’s north during the Depression, and has become a classic of
reformist literature.

Orwell’s politics were left-wing, but unorthodox. After quitting Burma he called himself an
anarchist, but later came to identify as a socialist. Unlike many of his left-wing
intellectual peers, however, he never allowed himself to be deluded by Soviet propaganda
and bitterly denounced the tyranny and imperialism regardless of its ideological
coloration. Although internationalist in his sympathies, he also retained a strong and
unfashionable patriotism. (His pen-name is a clue to this – George the dragon-slayer is the
patron saint of England and the Orwell is a river in Suffolk.)

In 1936, when Spain’s elected Republican government was overthrown in a Nationalist

military coup, Orwell went to ‘fight fascism’ in the ensuing civil war. He spent several
months in frontline fighting and was shot through the throat.

In this conflict, a dress rehearsal for the coming WWII, the Nationalist army were openly
backed by Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, while the defenders of the Republic
depended on arms supplied by Stalin’s Russia. At first, the forces of the Left – communist,
anarchist and liberal – collaborated in an anti-fascist alliance that was joined by fighters
from around the globe. Orwell himself joined the militia wing of the POUM, a Spanish
communist party hostile to Russian-style totalitarian government and historically aligned
with Stalin’s great rival Leon Trotsky.

For Orwell, Republican Spain offered an inspiring glimpse of the promised revolution: here
was a genuinely democratic, worker-controlled society in which all members contributed
to the best of their ability and wealth was shared according to need. However, this
utopian vision was soon dispelled by dystopian realities. From May 1937 onward, it became
clear that Stalin’s communist forces were more interested in destroying their opposition
on the Left than on defeating the fascists. Russian-backed factions denounced and purged
the anarchists and the POUM, arresting and murdering their erstwhile allies while the

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world’s media looked the other way. Orwell himself was pursued by secret police and had
to flee for his life.

Back in Britain, he was appalled to find that left-wing journals and publishers, wary of
criticising Stalin, were unwilling to publish his eye-witness accounts of the revolution’s
betrayal. In his brilliant memoir of this period, Homage to Catalonia, Orwell remarked
that ‘one of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing
press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right.’

From this point onwards, as Orwell himself put it, ‘every line of serious work’ that he
wrote was ‘against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.’ His
two most famous books, the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian
novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), both condemned the totalitarian oppression of Stalin’s
Russia, but also the dishonest ‘doublethink’ of so-called progressives and radicals who
allowed their moral conscience to be corrupted by venal self-interest or ideological
conformity. In both novels, the deliberate distortion of language by propaganda is a
central theme. Although these works were embraced by the anti-communist right,
especially in the United States, Orwell himself remained a committed socialist until his
early death from tuberculosis in January 1950. His life and work remain a monument to
the vocation of the dissident intellectual: speaking truth to power.

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About the essay
‘Politics and the English Language’ was written in late 1945, between Animal Farm and Nineteen
Eighty-Four. At this point in history, there was good reason to fear the 'general collapse’ of ‘global
civilisation’. In the name of ‘peace’, the United States had just bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki
with nuclear weapons, incinerating or poisoning 200,000 men, women and children. Allied troops
had recently entered Nazi Germany’s death camps, showing the world what Hitler really meant by
his euphemism ‘the Final Solution’. Stalin’s Russia – still praised as a people’s utopia by many
Western leftists – was embarked on a massive campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’, deporting and
massacring entire populations. And, despite its wartime rhetoric of global democracy, Great Britain
was ruthlessly reasserting its grip on an overseas empire built on brutal racist exploitation.
Everywhere, mass slaughter and totalitarian oppression were carried out behind the fig leaf of what
Orwell called ‘organised lying’: propaganda, misinformation and the ‘party line’.

The essay’s tone of controlled, sarcastic fury thus reflects Orwell’s sense of modern society’s
malaise. Although disgusted, the piece is not despairing. The author sets out, not only to diagnose
the sickness, but also to prescribe a remedy. Orwell’s central thesis is that the decay of language is
a cause, as well as a symptom, of the twentieth century’s moral disasters. If people everywhere
have lost faith in the truth, then the first step to a better post-war world is for politicians and
intellectuals to start saying what they mean and meaning what they say. Eighty years later, his
message seems just as relevant to our current era of ‘post-truth’ politics, online conspiracy
theories and corporate media propaganda.

‘Politics and the English Language’ first appeared in the literary journal Horizon: A Review of
Literature and Art – a ‘little magazine’ with a highly educated, left-leaning readership. Orwell thus
addresses his readers both as potential allies (people who care about the written word); and as
polemical targets (the same intellectuals whose prose has degenerated into lazy clichés and
ideological formulas.) The essay is thus something like a broadside sermon to a congregation of his
own peers, people who share his investment in this issue, as his mostly informal register and use of
first person plural pronouns (‘us’, ‘we’ and ‘our’) implies. With this specific audience in mind, he
can also assume that his reader’s familiarity with his various allusions. He feels no need to clarify
that Harold Laski, a professor of economics and political science, was also Chairman of the British
Labour Party; nor does he mention the biologist Hogben’s socialist activism. The unstated
implication is that politics, written expression and the education of the public are inseparable.

The key message of Orwell’s sermon is that style is a political issue. On the one hand, bad habits of
writing reflect the ‘mental vices’ to which politicians are especially susceptible: a preference for
vague abstractions rather than concrete truth-telling; a desire to evade or fudge controversial
positions; a reliance on automatic formulas rather than fresh thinking. Thus, Orwell says, political
writing is usually bad writing, since it ‘has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and
sheer cloudy vagueness.’ On the other hand, bad writing can also make these vices contagious:

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can
spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know
better.

Even writers and speakers who have no political reason to avoid the truth can succumb to
‘staleness of imagery’ and ‘lack of precision’ out of sheer laziness, falling back on ‘prefabricated’
phrases that are jammed together mechanically like Lego constructions. And this, in turn, has
pernicious consequences for the reading public. The terms of democratic debate become less clear;
opinions and attitudes become automated and ritualised; the political culture is infected with a
‘reduced state of consciousness’ that is ‘favourable to political conformity’. Whether committed
out of malice or neglect, the sin of bad writing helps to produce a brainwashed and apathetic
public.

The only cure, as Orwell sees it, is for writers to consciously, ‘scrupulously’, submit to the hard
work of thinking and speaking for themselves – renouncing cliché, avoiding obfuscation, forsaking
the pretentious ‘inflated style’ and valuing the concreteness and concision that allow for sound
moral judgement and democratic critical thinking.

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Key Elements for Exploration and Emulation
The ‘Classic Style’

In another of his essays, ‘Why I Write’, Orwell stated ‘good prose is like a window pane’. This
aphorism is one of the key assumptions underpinning what writing scholars call ‘the classic style’: a
mode of writing which values clarity, simplicity and grace over complexity, reflectiveness and
doubt. 1 Texts in the classic style are based on the metaphor that the writer (a competent,
intelligent layperson) is in intimate conversation with the reader (an equally insightful listener) and
guiding their gaze to an observable fact in the world. 2 The classic manner is direct, un-self-
conscious and declarative. For writers in the classic style, thought should proceed words: the
reader should receive fully cooked conclusions, not half-baked ruminations.

The classic style can thus be distinguished from other styles – the reflective, the contemplative, the
romantic, the prophetic or the practical, to name a few. Texts written in the classic style present
their perspective without acknowledging that it is a perspective, their version of the truth without
admitting that the truth has versions. This makes them both highly accessible and rhetorically
persuasive. It can (usually on re-reading) make such texts seem philosophically naïve and
psychologically simplistic – since facts are not always uncontroversial, truth not always self-evident
and solutions not always elegant.

Orwell’s essay is (mostly) written in the classic style, advocates for it, and manifests its typical
strengths and weaknesses. He uses the informal pronoun ‘you’ and the inclusive ‘we’ rather than
the more formal ‘one’. He regularly uses visual metaphors for understanding ‘It will be seen that…’,
‘It is clear that…’, ‘I have tried to show…’, ‘You see, …’

Figurative Language

The classic style should be distinguished from the ‘plain style’ suitable to technical writing such as
instruction manuals. Although he damns ornament for the sake of ornament, Orwell nevertheless
employs figurative language throughout the piece. His regular recourse to similes adds colour and
vividness to what would otherwise be abstract arguments:
- ‘phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.’
- ‘an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink.’
- ‘a mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and
covering up all the details.’
- ‘one turns… to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.’
- ‘his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically
into the familiar dreary pattern.’

These similes are self-consciously chosen: they model (mostly successfully) his advice about using
fresh rather than hackneyed imagery. They also often activate a field of connotations that helps to
prosecute his thesis that social, political and linguistic decadence go hand-in-hand. The images of
the choked sink and the shoddy hen-house are typical of Orwell’s keen eye for the squalor, ugliness
and listlessness of modern life and thus effectively embody the impoverishment of its prose. The
reference to cavalry horses in formation is obviously emblematic of the ritual movements of the
domesticated intelligence, but it also has connotations to do with militarism and traditionalism
(both of which he lambasts elsewhere in the essay) which help to associate unimaginative thinking
with unthinking conservatism and the ‘glorification of war’. The close proximity of the words ‘mass’
and ‘Latin’ in the snow simile likewise hint at the origins of obfuscatory jargon in the power of a

1
Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (2nd ed.)
(Princeton University Press, 2011)
2
Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to writing in the 21st Century (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 2014)
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priest over his congregation. And the word ‘cuttlefish’ automatically conveys associations of
slippery evasiveness that reinforce the larger point.

Because he wants to foreground the meticulous care he is taking with his images, Orwell prefers
similes (where the ‘like’ is explicit) over metaphors (where the ‘like’ is suppressed). However, he
does employ extended metaphors as a subtle structuring device to add to the piece’s overall
cohesion. The most important of these is the analogy he sets up to explain the vicious cycle
between bad thinking and bad writing. Orwell likens this interplay between lazy expression and
‘foolish thoughts’ to the downward spiral of an alcoholic who ‘drinks because he feels himself to be
a failure’ but ‘fail[s] all the more completely because he drinks.’ Again, Orwell provides us with a
masterclass in the rhetorical use of figurative language to reinforce a theoretical case. The analogy
helps us to follow his logic, but it also draws bad writing into association with ideas of addiction,
shame, moral decline and practical failure, mapping an abstract social problem onto a concrete
personal tragedy. Orwell sustains the connection through his continued use of diction drawn from
the semantic field of medical diagnosis and treatment: ‘vices’, ‘cases’, ‘decline’, ‘bad influence’,
‘cure’, ‘specimens’, ‘perversions’, ‘spread’, ‘habits’, ‘curable’, ‘a continuous temptation… a
packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow’, that will ‘anaesthetize one’s brain’… The meaning
implied is clear: bad writing is dangerous, degenerative, but a sickness that can be healed if we
have the will to heal it.

Enumeration

Another powerful rhetorical device Orwell models is the enumeration of examples in the form of a
list or – as he calls it - ‘a catalogue of swindles and perversions’. Under each subheading – ‘dying
metaphors’, ‘operators or verbal false limbs’, ‘pretentious diction’ and ‘meaningless words’ –
Orwell provides multiple examples and commentary on the problems with each of these ‘tricks’.
Although his categories may not stand up to close scrutiny (what is the difference between
‘pretentious diction’ and ‘meaningless words’?) and his examples may seem idiosyncratic (what is
wrong with ‘romantic’ in the field of ‘art criticism’?) this cataloguing technique is highly effective
rhetorically. It enhances Orwell’s credibility or ethos: this is no spontaneous rant, the reader
thinks, but a structured, comprehensive and systematic cultural diagnosis, based on extensive
study.

A similar effect is created by the six rules he lists at the end of the essay, each expressed in the
form of high modality imperatives.

Satirical Humour, Irony and Parody

‘Politics and the English Language’ has a serious point to make, but it is not without humour. Much
of this is satirical in intent. Orwell uses ridicule and comic exaggeration to deflate the pomposity of
writers that are used to being taken seriously by society. One example of this satirical humour is
his discussion of mixed metaphors:

By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of
leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the
significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image.
When these images clash — as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is
thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a
mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.

Another example is the mock ‘translation’ of a verse from the King James Bible into modern
English, which contrasts the vivid and concrete Old Testament verse with a porridge of abstractions
typical of contemporary academic discourse:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success
or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate
capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken
into account.

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Orwell admits that this is a parody (in other words, that it exaggerates the flaws of bad writing),
but he points out that the exaggeration is not extreme – sentences like this are depressingly
common.

A similar, if grimmer, humour is found in the passages where he turns the euphemisms favoured by
governments in time of war into their more accurate dysphemistic equivalents.

Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the
countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is
called pacification… People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of
the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of
unreliable elements.
To sharpen the edge of his satire still further, Orwell invites us to imagine a specific rhetorical
situation for these euphemisms: ‘a comfortable English professor defending Russian
totalitarianism’ 3 and decodes the unspeakable meaning behind his hypocritical bloviations: ‘I
believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’.

Orwell ends his essay with practical advice for better writing, but before that he employs irony by
offering the sarcastic suggestions via second person address:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four
questions, thus: 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? And he will probably ask
himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your
mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your
sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need
they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from
yourself…

Chremamorphism and the Imagery of Invective

One subtext of Orwell’s essay is the idea that language is what makes us human. The degradation
of language in the twentieth century thus betokens the loss of our humanity. In the modern world,
words, like goods, can be mass-produced. Writers and speakers, therefore, can be just as alienated
from their own output as assembly-line factory workers.

This idea is evident in his references to the ‘invasion’ of the mind by ‘ready-made phrases’; to the
‘gumming together long strips’ of ‘prefabricated’ words; to a ‘huge dump of worn-out metaphors’
and his final injunction to throw ‘lumps of verbal refuse’ into the rubbish bin.

It is conveyed most powerfully, though, in one of the few passages where Orwell paints a detailed
scene in words, describing a communist party official.

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar
phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the
world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching
a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at
moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs
which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who
uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a
machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved
as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one
that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what
he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church.

3
Orwell may have had the eminent scientist J.D. Bernal (an enthusiastic apologist for Stalinism and a terrible
writer) in his sights here – but he had many other enemies who would fit the frame just as well.
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This comparison of man to machine, made vivid by the contemptuous invective ‘some tired hack’
and by the image of a man with discs instead of eyes 4, is an example of chremamorphism – the
attribution of mechanical or robotic properties to a human being. This passage, because it uses
imagery and anecdote to ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’, appeals more powerfully to our emotions
(pathos) than any other section of the text. It is here that Orwell’s polemic seems most personal.

Syntactical Schemes

Good persuasive writing is catchy. Words are ordered and repeated in ways that make them
memorable and ‘quotable’. Orwell uses a variety of syntactic devices to heighten the rhetorical
impact of his arguments. These include:

- Aphorisms (concise statements that express a general truth), e.g.

o “In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them.”
o “The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.”
o “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
- Polyptoton (riffing on words with a shared root),
o “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the
indefensible.”
- Chiasmus (a figure where grammatical structures are repeated in reverse order)
o “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
- Accumulative listing (a piling up of words that can often convey a steady increase in
emotional intensity)
o “All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly,
hatred and schizophrenia.”

4
An image which he repeats when describing a Party official in his later novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
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Lesson 1
Read through the sections above called ‘About the Author’ and ‘About the Text’. Then
read through the printed copy of the essay in the booklet provided. As you go, use
different coloured pens to highlight:

- Two passages that sum up Orwell’s message or thesis.

- Two passages that provide clues as to why Orwell wrote this piece and how
his purpose was influenced by his context.
- Two passages that reveal something about how Orwell saw his audience.
- Four passages that stand out for their especially skilful or persuasive use of
language to:
o Evoke emotion (the appeal to pathos)
o Build a well-reasoned argument (the appeal to logos)
o Establish Orwell’s trustworthiness and expertise (the appeal to ethos).

- Two passages that resonate with you personally or that you think are still
relevant in today’s world.

BE SELECTIVE!

Homework in Preparation for Lesson 2

Finish reading and highlighting the essay. Write margin notes to briefly sum up your
response to each highlighted passage.

Read through the notes above called Elements for Exploration and Emulation and
write down TWO key understandings and ONE question that you would like clarified.
Bring these to class for discussion next week.

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