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FAWS comments on Rationality and the English Language - Less Wrong
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Comments (32)
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.