Suggest, don't tell

Orwell condensed his approach to writing good English prose into the following elementary rules:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

(from Politics and the English Language [1945]. Full text available here: http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/index.cgi/work/essays/language.html)

I follow Orwell in believing that good writing is always defined by its clarity, concision and coherence. Further to this, I believe that the best way to demonstrate an understanding of a subject is to write about it in a robust, comprehensible way. Of all the major, global, English-language publications, I feel that The Economist most closely adheres to Orwell's vision of good writing (indeed, The Economist Style Guide opens with the rules quoted above). Despite the complexity and variousness of its subject matter, The Economist's analyses are almost always couched in terms with which the non-expert, the weekend economist, feels at home.

The editorial style of The Economist demonstrates another virtue of this sort of rigourous writing. The laconic touches which it occasionally permits itself derive their effectiveness from the objective neutrality of the rest of the text. Likewise, if you want to advocate a particular viewpoint (or sell a particular product), the best way to do so is by writing clearly and logically on the subject in question. In other words: suggest, don't tell. Prove your expertise, and people will want to know your opinion.

Having worked as an English teacher, I am very aware of the effects of the growing global hegemony of English. It is crucial, I believe, to make a distinction between English as it is lived and spoken by native speakers (which term is in itself a false construction) and the version of English which is used globally as a kind of business-Esperanto. I have heard many anecdotes which illustrate this theme: a bilingual French man once told me about a meeting he had attended, alongside a Russian, a Brazilian and a Chinese person, all of whom were communicating perfectly happily in an English which the French man himself could not follow.

The great strength of English is the way in which it can be used to express ideas precisely and concisely. This is why a Spanish or Italian novel translated into English will invariably be substantially shorter than the original. This is also, in part, the reason for its expansion as a global lingua franca. However, the proliferation of English necessitates more than ever an adherence to Orwell's famous principles; if English is to cement its position as a genuinely progressive tool for inter-cultural communication, we must not lose sight of those qualities which enabled it to reach that position in the first place.