Reading George Orwell’s article about the English language opened my eyes at how I should strive to be a better writer. Orwell critiqued 5 sentences and\u00a0stated that they all share two things in common: “Staleness of imagery…lack of precision”. I have found after looking over other papers I have written for this class and others that I have fallen victim to being too abstract or struggling to express a meaning. I will blame myself for this, but I also feel that some of the blame lies with high school English teachers whom from my personal experience valued style over substance, and it is hard to shake off a writing style one has done for many years when suddenly you realize that it’s actually substance over style. Orwell lists six rules to follow that can be summarized as “if it can be simple and succinct, then go with that”. \u00a0I agree with @jessica42’s comment that trying to write with big words to sound interesting\u00a0and feel smarter is not the way to go in writing, but I would not go as far as to say that the writing I have done up until now has been “very terrible” like Jessica described about her own writing. While Orwell makes good points, it’s easy to forget that culture and society can change and in modern times it has changed rapidly, so while we can try to follow Orwell’s advice and rules, actually implementing them is a challenge but it is a challenge worth facing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading George Orwell’s article about the English language opened my eyes at how I should strive to be a better writer. Orwell critiqued 5 sentences and\u00a0stated that they all share two things in common: “Staleness of imagery…lack of precision”. I have found after looking over other papers I have written for this class and others […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=924"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":931,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924\/revisions\/931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist300a-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}