![]() ![]() ![]() George Orwell’s essay is just as true now as it was when he wrote it, during that unstable in-between period when World War II had ended, but the Cold War had not yet – quite – begun. Her email sent me back to what I still think is one of the most important pieces of writing about writing, George Orwell’s 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language. In fact, she’s still a pretty good writer, with an interesting topic and fascinating source material – but how sad that writing a PhD might have such a stifling effect! And every academic knows, if they are honest, that there’s some truth in what she says. Partly, it’s the pressure to publish as quickly as possible, but sometimes there’s a perverse security to be found in woolly prose and arcane jargon that prove we are a part of the group.Ī friend yesterday sent me the draft of an article to read, with an apology that she used to be a better writer before she wrote her PhD. It’s the next stage though – making those pages readable to either a specialist or a general audience (and deciding which one is more important) – that we academics particularly seem to struggle with. I’m sure people have been complaining about the aridity and complexity of academic writing since Edward Casaubon first put pen to paper in Middlemarch.Īll writers, I’m sure, go through a stage where the imperative is to get everything down on the page. There’s been a lot of discussion recently about how bad much academic writing is. ![]()
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