Voice

How to Write Like George Orwell

His plain style looks like the absence of style. It's the opposite: a set of deliberate, learnable rules — and the discipline to keep them.

By Adi Lungu · Updated July 2026

Most "write more clearly" advice stops at be clear, which is about as useful as telling someone to be funny. Orwell is the exception. In his 1946 essay on politics and language he did something rare: he turned clarity into a checklist. His prose reads as though it has no technique at all — and that flatness is the technique. He compared good writing to a clean window: the point is that you look straight through it to the thing on the other side, never at the glass.

That effect is built, not born. Below are the moves that produce it, the famous rules restated plainly, a worked example that drags an inflated sentence back down to earth, and — because plainness is not always the right tool — where his style actively fails you.

The instinct underneath everything: concrete over abstract

Orwell's single deepest habit is to prefer the thing you can see to the idea you can only gesture at. Where a weaker writer reaches for a situation of significant instability, he writes the roof was coming down. Abstraction is where bad writing hides — it lets you sound like you're saying something while committing to nothing. The fix is almost mechanical: whenever a sentence floats up into the abstract, ask what it would look like if you filmed it, and write that instead.

The rules, restated plainly

Orwell offered a short list of working rules for anyone willing to take some trouble over their sentences. Paraphrased, so I'm not just reciting him:

1. Avoid the metaphor you've seen a hundred times

Dead metaphors — a level playing field, at the end of the day — slip past the reader without producing any picture at all. They feel like writing while doing none of writing's work. Either find a fresh image or drop the figure entirely and say the plain thing.

2. Prefer the short word to the long one

Not because long words are wrong, but because reaching for them is usually a tell — a way of sounding authoritative instead of being clear. Utilise is use wearing a costume.

3. If a word can come out, take it out

The most reliable single edit in English. Most first drafts are 20% padding. Cutting it doesn't lose meaning; it concentrates it.

4. Use the active voice by default

Mistakes were made is the passive doing exactly what the passive is often hired to do: hide who did it. I got it wrong is shorter, clearer, and braver.

5. Cut the jargon and the imported phrase when a plain word exists

Every field grows a private vocabulary that signals membership. Useful among insiders; a wall to everyone else. If an everyday word carries the meaning, use it.

6. Break any of these before writing something genuinely ugly

This last rule is the one people forget, and it's the most important. The list is a servant, not a scripture. If obeying a rule forces a clumsy sentence, disobey it. Orwell's plainness was a choice made line by line, not a cage.

Rhythm: the short sentence lands the punch

Read Orwell aloud and you'll notice he builds. A run of medium sentences carrying the argument, and then a short one that shuts the door. The short sentence works because of the longer ones around it — contrast is the whole mechanism. Make everything short and you get a telegram; make everything long and the reader drowns. The skill is knowing which sentence is the one that should be four words, and saving the brevity for it.

Honesty as a style, not just a virtue

The thing that's hardest to copy is that Orwell writes as if he's decided not to protect himself. He states the unflattering version — including about his own side, his own motives. Most inflated prose is inflated precisely to avoid being pinned down. So a surprising amount of "writing like Orwell" is really a decision about content: say the specific, checkable, slightly-risky thing instead of the vague, safe one. The plain style is what's left once you stop hedging.

Worked example: from fog to window

Start with a sentence of the kind that fills reports and press releases:

"In light of ongoing operational challenges, a decision has been taken to implement a rationalisation of headcount across affected business units."

Step 1 — undo the passive and name the actor. Who decided?

Step 2 — kill the jargon. Rationalise headcount is a costume for one blunt fact.

Step 3 — cut what can go, and let one short sentence carry the weight.

The last version is harder to write, because it's harder to hide behind. That difficulty is the point. Nothing was made longer, no clever words were added — the fog simply came off, and what was underneath had to be faced.

What to avoid

Three ways imitations of Orwell go wrong. First, mistaking plain for flat: his sentences are plain in vocabulary but sharp in image and specific in fact — drain the specificity and you get grey, not clear. Second, weaponising the rules to bully other people's prose while your own stays vague; the rules are for your own drafts. Third, forgetting rule six and producing stiff, clipped, joyless sentences because a rule said so.

When this is the wrong tool

Plainness is built for exposition, argument, journalism, and any writing whose job is to transfer a fact or a case without distortion. It is a poor fit where ambiguity, music, or ornament is the payload — lyric poetry, a wedding toast, a piece meant to shimmer rather than inform. Orwell would have been the first to say so: the window-pane ideal is an ideal for a particular kind of prose, not a law of all writing.

Why bother

Because once you can see these moves, you catch yourself making the opposite ones by default — reaching for the long word, hiding the actor, padding the line, choosing the safe abstraction over the specific claim. You don't have to write like Orwell all the time. But knowing how he did it means that when a sentence needs to be honest and unmissable, you have the levers, and you know which way to pull them.

If you'd rather watch this happen to your own sentence than read about it, that's what this site's tool does — pick Orwell's register, paste a line, and see the fog lift.