George Orwell’s 6 rules for writing were too absolute. Here’s a more flexible version

Editor’s note: This article was reviewed and updated in July 2026 to meet Expert Editor’s latest editorial standards.

George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language, published in 1946, is a battle cry in the fight against bad English.

In Orwell’s eyes, written English has become slovenly, vague and meaningless, resulting in a decadent cilvilisation (it’s not as hyperbolic as it sounds considering that the 1940s wasn’t humanity’s finest decade).

The legacy of Orwell’s rant against sloppy writing is the following six commandments.

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 a word out, 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.

The standard of English writing would improve immeasurably if more writers, including lawyers, online marketers, economists, public sector workers, and even computer programmers, took Orwell’s six rules to heart.

Students and authors should also sooner take heed of Orwell’s rules than swallow another thesaurus. As an editor, I read a lot of academic writing and novels, and three common flaws permeate it – wordiness, vagueness and pomposity. These are the three problems that Orwell was so fired up about.

The importance of clear and accessible writing is uncontested. Language shapes how we perceive and categorise experience – a 2006 study by Jules Davidoff, working with the Himba people of Namibia, found that speakers whose language lacks a word for blue struggled to distinguish it from green, suggesting that the words we have available influence the distinctions we make.

Although Orwell may be a prophet to the plain English movement, no prophet should be above rebuke (take note, religion).

For a man who rallied against authoritarianism in 1984 and Animal Farm, Orwell’s prescription for clear writing is oddly totalitarian. The absolutism of the six rules is striking, especially the prohibition on the use of established metaphors (they can actually be quite melodic to read) and the passive voice. Arguably, both aren’t as grievous a threat to good writing as wordiness, vagueness and pomposity.

Even The Economist, whose Style Guide has long opened with a nod to Orwell’s 6 rules for writing, pushed back against the first five rules for their unqualified “never” and “always” — taking the position that good writing has no room for the tyrant.

The strict application of these rules would not only be extremely difficult, but they’d also make writing a rules-based, joyless affair. Like any creative pursuit, writing isn’t something that benefits from being shackled by prescription.

Where the rules go too far

Three rules in particular reward a closer look, because the problems they create are specific, not abstract.

Rule 1 — Dead metaphors. Orwell’s target here is the genuinely tired cliché: leave no stone unturned, level playing field, at the end of the day. These are fair game. But the rule as written bans any figure of speech “you are used to seeing in print”, which would disqualify vast swathes of literary English. Consider “the turning of the tide” or “a stab of guilt” — both familiar, both still doing meaningful work. A blanket prohibition would strip writing of rhythm and resonance.

Rule 4 — The passive voice. The passive is frequently used to avoid responsibility — politicians are masters of “mistakes were made” — and in those cases Orwell is absolutely right to object. But the passive voice has entirely legitimate uses. Scientists writing up experiments use the passive to keep the focus on what was observed rather than who observed it. Historians use it when the agent of an action is unknown or irrelevant. And sometimes the passive simply produces a better sentence: “The window was smashed” places dramatic emphasis on the window; “Someone smashed the window” shifts it unnecessarily onto the unknown someone.

Rule 3 — Cut everything cuttable. Lean prose is almost always better prose. But the extreme version of this rule can excise the small qualifications and hedges that make writing honest. Academic writing in particular often needs a phrase like “in most cases” or “this suggests, though does not prove” — cutting them doesn’t sharpen the prose, it makes it inaccurate.

The spirit versus the letter

Orwell’s rules are most valuable as habits of vigilance, not hard prohibitions. Taken too literally, they can produce prose that is efficient but arid — the written equivalent of a meal that hits every nutritional target but tastes of nothing. Before you reach for the passive, ask yourself whether the active would be clearer. Before you deploy a metaphor, ask yourself whether it still has life in it. Before you use a jargon word, ask whether a plainer one exists.

The difference between applying the rules as a tyrant would and applying them as a thoughtful writer would comes down to intention. Orwell himself, it should be noted, broke several of his own rules in the very essay that contains them — a fact that is either magnificently hypocritical or a subtle demonstration that Rule 6, the escape clause, is the most important rule of all.

A quick before-and-after

Here is a single sentence that violates several of Orwell’s rules at once, followed by a revision guided by their spirit rather than their letter:

Before: “It is the considered opinion of the undersigned that the utilisation of unnecessarily prolix terminology serves no constructive purpose and should, in the fullness of time, be discontinued.”

After: “Using long words for the sake of it serves no purpose. Stop.”

The revision cuts wordiness, replaces Latin-rooted vocabulary with plain English equivalents, and switches from the passive construction “should be discontinued” to a direct imperative. It also has a voice. That balance — clear, direct, but still human — is what a revised, less totalitarian reading of Orwell’s rules should aim for.

George Orwell’s 6 rules for writing, revisited

Here’s my shot at improving on George Orwell’s 6 rules for writing to make them less totalitarian:

1. Avoid cliched figures of speech, but don’t fear a metaphor that’s familiar and still doing real work.
2. Prefer the shorter word when it says the same thing, without sacrificing precision to chase brevity.
3. Cut what’s redundant, not what’s honest — keep the hedges and qualifications that make a claim accurate.
4. Default to the active voice, but use the passive when the action matters more than who did it.
5. Reach for the plain word first, but keep the technical term when precision genuinely requires it.
6. Break any of these rules — including this one — the moment doing so serves the reader better.

That’s the difference between rules that discipline your writing and rules that just discipline you.