Orwell’s argument that the great enemy of clear language is insincerity

The usual story about bad writing is that it’s a skill problem. The writer didn’t learn the rules, didn’t trim the fat, didn’t have a teacher who beat the passive voice out of them. Fix the technique, the thinking goes, and the fog clears.

I believed this for years. I still half-believe it on the days when a sentence won’t come out straight no matter how many times I rearrange it.

But there’s an older and stranger diagnosis, and the more I write the more I think it’s the truer one. It says that most bad writing isn’t a failure of craft at all. It’s a tell. The fog is doing a job.

What Orwell actually diagnosed

In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell wrote that “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.” The mechanism he describes is precise: “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

That cuttlefish image is the whole argument in one picture. The ink isn’t an accident. It’s a defense. When a writer can’t say plainly what they actually mean, because what they actually mean won’t survive being said plainly, the prose thickens on its own. Orwell was writing about politics, and his verdict there was bleak. He claimed that in his time “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible”. Strong stuff, and a generalization about his own moment rather than a timeless law. But the underlying observation travels far beyond politics.

I should say plainly that I’m not a linguist or a psychologist, and Orwell’s line is an opinion, a sharp one, not a measured finding about how language works. Take it as a lens, not a law.

The counter-frame: maybe it’s just a blind spot

Not every murky sentence is hiding something. Experimental psychologist Steven Pinker has said,“I think the curse of knowledge is the chief contributor to opaque writing.” He defines that curse, in a Harvard talk, as “the failure to understand that other people don’t know what we know.” On this view the academic who writes unreadably isn’t defending anything. They’ve just forgotten what it’s like not to already know the thing.

That’s real. And there’s evidence the dense prose itself is the obstacle, whatever the motive. A 2022 study by Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica and Edward Gibson found that legal excerpts were recalled and comprehended at lower rates when they carried features like center-embedded clauses and low-frequency jargon, even for experienced readers, with the difficulty traced to those features rather than to the ideas being hard. So motive isn’t the only culprit. Sometimes the writer simply can’t see the reader.

What sincerity actually demands

Orwell’s prescription is less about technique than people expect. Yes, the essay ends with six rules, the famous one being “Never use a long word where a short one will do.” But the rules sit underneath a harder demand. He recommended asking yourself a short list of questions before you write a sentence: “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?”

Look at the first one. What am I trying to say. Not “what would sound impressive,” not “what will protect my position.” That single question is the whole insincerity test, because you cannot answer it and keep the fog at the same time. The cuttlefish only works while the writer avoids naming the real aim. The moment you make yourself say it, the ink has nowhere to go.

None of this is a claim that I’ve solved it. I write four versions of a paragraph, delete all of them, walk around the kitchen, make a second coffee, and the version I finally keep is usually the one where I stopped trying to come out of the sentence looking good. That’s the pattern I keep noticing, in my own drafts and in my own self-talk. The sentences go clear at the exact moment I stop protecting something. No new technique gets applied. Nothing gets cut for length. The fog just isn’t needed anymore, so it lifts.