In 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay that should be read by everyone who needs to convey an idea. Orwell’s thesis is that clouded language leads to clouded thinking, and so we should strive to choose the words that most appropriately convey what we mean to say.
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is unavoidably ugly?
Orwell wasn’t concerned with word choice because of his love of Shakespearean sound or his disdain for youthful talk. He recognized that the “slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts”:
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless 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. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. Such phraseology is need if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
And so, Orwell leaves us with six rules for good writing:
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
.
This intended obfuscation (there, there) is extremely common in academic discourse. I tore my hair out trying to make sense of Derrida in undergrad. In academia, especially in the languages and philosophy, there is a deliberate attempt to make papers hard to read.
One of my professors attributed this to the influence of Kant. Kant was a famously bad writer, but his ideas were revolutionary (for his time) and his influence was supreme for at least two centuries. Lots of philosophers emulated his writing style, so much so that it became the norm in academic discourse.
This practice bled into fields other than philosophy as well. Lyotard, Derrida, Spivak – they are atrociously bad to read. But there are also guys like Barthes who are delightfully straightforward.
Personally, I attribute using big words to a matter of habit, especially if you’ve spent more than 4 years in a University. You start thinking in terms of big words, which starts affecting your writing.
Excellent, excellent points.
I would say that using big words isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Reading someone like Christopher Hitchens, who chooses a lot of underused and unfamiliar words, takes more effort, but his choices make his writing so much richer, and his meaning so much clearer. Pick nearly any sentence out of one of his essays, and you know how he feels about a subject.