ArisKatsaris comments on Rationality and the English Language - Less Wrong

35 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 September 2007 10:55PM

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Comment author: ArisKatsaris 07 September 2011 12:03:06AM 1 point [-]

But this makes these rules useless as advice, since the exceptions are supposed to be guided by aesthetic feeling -- and those whose feeling is refined enough ipso facto already know what to do even without Orwell.

Orwell prefaces his rules by the following sentence:

one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

In short, he explicitly states that it's when this aesthetic instinct fails that the rules are to be applied. And he talks in detail about the process he suggests be used BEFORE turning to the rules as a last resort.

The second LL article cites a result that the use of passives in Orwell's essay is in fact well above the average found in a large sample of English prose.

Possible, but mostly irrelevant, unless we're shown that Orwell used the passive somewhere where he ought have used the active...