Speaking to your audience

John Bonner
English 102, Christy Vance
Reading Response

Advice from George Orwell

When I first started reading this I was a little apprehensive but as I continued my opinion of it completely changed. I started to notice that Orwell was not talking at me, but rather to me. I started noticing little mistakes that I commonly make when writing papers.
The first of which is my tendency to ramble on, I can’t help that fact it has just always been the nature of me. When Orwell said that our language becomes ugly because our thoughts were foolish, I thought this was brilliant, which may indeed be a foolish thought. This might be the root cause of all my ramblings; I might just seem to get to emotion in a piece of writing and just never shut up. I hope that I can learn from this reading and improve upon the writing that I have already done.
The other thing that Orwell mentioned was about the way we can dress up certain words or phrases, so that we can give it an air of scientific impartiality to our claim. What I gather from this was that Orwell wanted us to use large scientific words in our paper to give our ludicrous proposals some sort of importance. He later counteracts this with his simple rules on the back sheet by saying that we should never use scientific jargon when a simple English word will do just fine. This is by far the greatest lesson he could have taught me.
All in all this was an important read, at least for me. I believe I have learned to clarify my paper so that I may be able to speak to my audience and hopefully connect with them.