If you want to improve your writing in 30 minutes, read George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language. “Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way,” he begins. After analysing some contemporary specimens of terrible prose, he provides his famous six rules for good writing, starting with: “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.”

如果你想在30分钟里提高你的写作，请读一读乔治•奥威尔(George Orwell)的杂文《政治与英语》(Politics and the English Language)。“大多数用心思考这个问题的人都承认，英语的现状不佳，”这篇文章是这样开头的。在分析了几个当时的糟糕行文案例后，他提出了著名的有关良好写作的6条规则，其中第一条是：“永远不要用书刊中常见的那些暗喻、明喻以及其他各种修辞手法。”

Orwell’s essay appeared 70 years ago this month in Horizon magazine, but his advice hasn’t dated. What has changed, and for the better, is language. The kind of plain speech he favoured has now gone mainstream. Political language in particular — Orwell’s great concern — is much clearer today. To find the kind of bad writing that serves to hide truths, you have to look elsewhere.

奥威尔的这篇杂文于70年前的4月发表在《地平线》(Horizon)杂志上，但他给出的建议还没有过时。改变且是朝着好的方向改变了的，是英语语言本身。他所青睐的那种平实的语言现在成为了主流。尤其是，奥威尔最关注的政治语言，今天已经变得清晰得多。要想找到那种目的是掩盖真相的糟糕写作，你得上别的领域看一看。

His essay lists various useless, ugly or pretentious words and phrases that were common in political language then: “take up the cudgel for”, “mailed fist”, “clarion”, “hotbed”, “petit bourgeois”. Today hardly anyone uses these words, and they haven’t simply been replaced by new clichés. Rather, just as Orwell hoped, written language has become more like speech.

他的杂文列举出了当时的政治语言中常见的各种毫无意义、缺乏美感或者装腔作势的字眼：“take up the cudgel for”（毅然支持）, “mailed fist”(武力), “clarion”(号角), “hotbed”（温床）, “petit bourgeois”（小资产阶级）。今天几乎已没有人再使用这些字眼，人们也并不是用新的陈词滥调简单地替换了它们。相反，正如奥威尔所希望的，书面语言已经变得更像口头语言。

That’s partly thanks to email and social media. Everyone’s a writer nowadays. Most people on Facebook, Twitter or blogs try to sound like Orwell: they use everyday words, and speak in the subjective “I” rather than as some fake-omniscient expert. Some of this clear writing is stupid, and some is clever. What it doesn’t do is use fancy language to make stupidity sound clever.

这在一定程度上要归因于电子邮件和社交媒体。现在每个人都是写作者。Facebook、Twitter或者博客上的大多数人都试着像奥威尔那样写作：他们使用日常语言，以第一人称口吻发表看法，而不是借看似渊博的专家之口。这些表达清楚的文字，有的愚蠢，有的聪明。但这些文字不会做的是，用浮夸的语言让愚蠢的观点听起来聪明。

The casual style has spread across professional writing too. In Orwell’s day, writers often paraded their learning. He cites a sentence from Professor Harold Laski, which starts, “I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a 17th-century Shelley had not become . . . ”

随意的文字风格也扩展到了专业性写作领域。在奥威尔的时代，作家往往喜欢掉书袋。奥威尔引用了哈罗德•拉斯基(Harold Laski)教授写的一句话：“事实上，我不确定这样说是否不正确：一度看上去不是不像17世纪的雪莱(Shelley)的弥尔顿(Milton)，并没有变成……”

But nobody trying to reach readers today writes like that. Modern-day populism discourages pompous displays of learning. The idea that educated people know best has become, for better and worse, a political taboo. Technological change has also helped make pomposity unfashionable. Laski’s editor had no idea which articles people read and which they didn’t. But now we know not just what people click on, but how far down the article they read. On the downside, that encourages “clickbait”. On the upside, it encourages writers to be clear.

但现在已经没有想要打动读者的人会这样写文章了。现代民粹主义不鼓励卖弄学识。“受过教育的人懂得最多”在政治上已经是一种犯忌的想法了——不管这是好事是坏事。技术变革也促使卖弄变得不合时宜。当年拉斯基教授的编辑不知道人们读哪些文章、不读哪些文章。但现在，我们不仅知道人们点击哪篇文章，还知道这篇文章他们读到了哪里停下。坏处是，这助长了“骗点击”的行为。好处是，这鼓励作者行文清晰。

The party hacks of Orwell’s time who used deceptive language to hide truths have almost died out. Today most political writing is against parties, and aims to sound conversational. Here’s a typical modern political tweet, by Telegraph journalist Ben Wright, responding to a pro-Brexit comment by British Conservative politician Michael Gove: “UK will join ‘Bosnia, Serbia, Albania and Ukraine’ in a European free trade zone, said Gove. Wow! Where do I sign?”

奥威尔时代的那种利用欺骗性语言掩盖真相的政党写手，如今几乎已经绝迹。今天的大多数政治文字都是反对政党的，并且尽力写得像对话一样随意。以下是一条典型的当代政治推文(tweet)，是英国《每日电讯报》(The Telegraph)记者本•赖特(Ben Wright)对英国保守党政治人士迈克尔•戈夫(Michael Gove)支持英国退欧评论的回应：“戈夫说，英国将跟‘波斯尼亚、塞尔维亚、阿尔巴尼亚和乌克兰’一道，加入一个欧洲自由贸易区。哇！太好了！我要在哪里签字？”

Orwell would have approved even of Wright’s casual grammar. “Correct grammar and syntax”, he writes, “are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear.”

奥威尔甚至会认可赖特这种随意的语法。“只要一个人能把他的意思表达清楚，”他写道，“正确的语法和句法无关紧要。”

There’s now an incipient shift to clarity even in academia, long a domain of lifeless language. A friend doing a PhD in English literature once explained to me that she had to use literary-theory jargon “because otherwise people think you don’t know it”.

学术界长期以来被枯燥语言所占领，然而现在就连这个领域也开始向清晰的文风转变。我的一位攻读英国文学博士学位的朋友曾经向我解释，她不得不使用文学理论术语，“否则其他人会认为你根本不懂”。

Some academics are still determined to be unintelligible. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman is a brilliant thinker but he writes sentences like this: “While solids have clear spatial dimensions but neutralise the impact, and thus downgrade the significance, of time (effectively resist its flow or render it irrelevant), fluids do not keep to any shape for long and are constantly ready (and prone) to change it; and so for them it is the flow of time that counts . . . ” Et cetera. The problem here is not the individual words but Bauman’s tin-eared attempt to bolt five sentences together into one.

一些学者依然打定主意要使用晦涩难懂的语言。社会学家齐格蒙特•鲍曼(Zygmunt Bauman)是一位睿智的思想者，但他写出来的句子是这样的：“固体有明确的空间尺寸，但它消灭时间的影响，因此降低时间的重要性（有效地抵御时间流逝或使其无关紧要），而流体则不会长时间保持任何形状，随时准备着（并易于）改变形状；因此对它们来说重要的是时间的流逝……”等等。这里的问题不在于单个字眼，而是鲍曼不管不顾地试图把5句话才能说完的事情塞进1句话里说。

But the internet is changing academic language, because it is giving more academics the scope to become public intellectuals. The Washington Post’s blog The Monkey Cage, for instance, lets political scientists speak to a large public. That encourages plain language.

但互联网正在改变学术语言，因为互联网赋予更多学者成为公共知识分子的机会。比如，《华盛顿邮报》(Washington Post)的博客“猴子笼”(The Monkey Cage)，让政治学家能够面向广大的公众群体表达观点。这鼓励平实的语言。

Some havens of bad English survive. One is business jargon, wonderfully charted by my colleague Lucy Kellaway. Business people use words such as “go-forward scenario” and “flexponsive” because they are trying to sound cutting-edge.

依然还有一些领域为糟糕英语提供容身之处。其中一个是商业术语，我的同事露西•凯拉韦(Lucy Kellaway)对此进行了精彩记述。商界人士使用“前进情景”(go-forward scenario)和“灵活回应”(flexponsive)这样的词，原因是他们想要显得前卫。

But impenetrable language thrives best in zones where people have an incentive to bore the public away. In finance, ordinary Joes paid no attention to “CDOs” and “securitisation” until it was too late.

但令人费解的语言最盛行的地方，是人们有动力让公众因为感到无聊而走开的领域。在金融领域，普通人不关心“债务抵押债券”(CDO)和“证券化”(securitisation)，直到为时已晚。

Another zone of impenetrable language is Brussels. After a morning at the European Commission, anyone fond of the English language will feel tempted by Brexit. A multinational community of law graduates, steeped in French bureaucratic jargon, and happiest away from the public gaze, will write “vade mecum” when they mean handbook, and “modalities” for arrangements. When you try to reach them, they will reply that they are “on mission” instead of travelling.

另一个令人费解的语言的重灾区是布鲁塞尔。在欧盟委员会(European Commission)待上一个上午以后，任何喜爱英语的人都会对英国退欧动心。一群来自各个国家的法学院毕业生，熟悉法语官僚行话，又乐得不受公众关注，他们会把手册写成“vade mecum”，把安排写成“modalities”。当你试图联系他们的时候，他们不说自己在出差，而用“执行任务”(on mission)这个说法。

Most people today know how to communicate. If they sound unintelligible, it’s probably because they want to.

今天大多数人都知道如何与人交流。如果他们的话听起来晦涩难懂，那他们很可能是故意的。