= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
MatthewW comments on Rationality and the English Language - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (32)
I see at least three problems with your criticism:
Orwell doesn't provide any useful guidelines on when the exceptions to his rules should apply. He only says you shouldn't use them when it would make you sound "outright barbarous." 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.
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. So whatever exeptions to his rules he has in mind, this necesarily implies that he breaks his own advice. There is no reasonable interpretaton of his admonition to avoid passives, whatever caveats and exceptions are attached to it, that would permit writing a whole essay with such an exceptionally high rate of passives.
One sample of old text is very weak evidence of the average quality of old writing. Especially considering that it's from a highly non-representative source. (By which I mean a high-budget collaborative translation by top-rate English stylists, which has also survived popularity competition with other Biblical translations.)
The useful advice is in the first 5000 words of the essay, most importantly in the examples of bad writing. The 100 words or so of 'rules' are just a summary at the end.
This kind of teaching is common in other subjects. For example, in a Go textbook it's not rare to see a chapter containing a number of examples and a purported 'rule' to cover them, where the rule as stated is broken all the time in professional play. It would be a mistake to conclude that the author isn't a strong player, or that the chapter doesn't contain helpful advice. The 'rule' is just a way to describe a group of related examples.
I think it's better to think of the 'rules' in Orwell's essay more like mnemonics for what he's said earlier, rather than instructions to be followed on their own.
It would however be reasonable to conclude that the author does not have strong analytic understanding of what exactly makes them a strong player/good writer, and be cautious about the more abstract parts of the advice, similar to how native speakers can tell you whether a sentence is grammatical, but are usually less reliable for giving you general rules than speakers who learned the language as adults to a high level of proficiency.