Saturday, 22 October 2011

George Orwell’s 5 Rules for Effective Writing

George Orwell’s 5 Rules for Effective Writing

Written by Editor in Chief, Pick The Brain
In our society, the study of language and literature is the domain of poets, novelists, and literary critics. Language is considered a decorative art, fit for entertainment and culture, but practically useless in comparison to the concrete sciences. Just look at the value of a college degree in English versus one in computer science or accounting.

But is this an accurate assessment of value?

Language is the primary conductor between your brain and the minds of your audience. Ineffective language weakens and distorts ideas.

If you want to be understood, if you want your ideas to spread, using effective language must be your top priority.In the modern world of business and politics this is hardly ever the case. In many instances, imprecise language is used intentionally to avoid taking a position and offending various demographics. No wonder it’s hard to make sense of anything!

This is hardly a recent problem, and as George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, the condition is curable. By following Orwell’s 5 rules for effective writing, you’ll distinguish yourself from competitors and clearly communicate your ideas.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
This sounds easy, but in practice is incredibly difficult. Phrases such as toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, an axe to grind, Achilles’ heel, swan song, and hotbed come to mind quickly and feel comforting and melodic.

For this exact reason they must be avoided. Common phrases have become so comfortable that they create no emotional response. Take the time to invent fresh, powerful images.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
Long words don’t make you sound intelligent unless used skillfully. In the wrong situation they’ll have the opposite effect, making you sound pretentious and arrogant. They’re also less likely to be understood and more awkward to read.

When Hemingway was criticized by Faulkner for his limited word choice he replied:

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree (Ezra Pound). Accordingly, any words that don’t contribute meaning to a passage dilute its power. Less is always better. Always.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
This one is frequently broken, probably because many people don’t know the difference between active and passive verbs. I didn’t myself until a few months ago. Here is an example that makes it easy to understand:

The man was bitten by the dog. (passive)The dog bit the man. (active).The active is better because it’s shorter and more forceful.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
This is tricky because much of the writing published on the internet is highly technical. If possible, remain accessible to the average reader. If your audience is highly specialized this is a judgment call. You don’t want to drag on with unnecessary explanation, but try to help people understand what you’re writing about. You want your ideas to spread right?

6. Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.

This bonus rule is a catch all. Above all, be sure to use common sense.These rules are easy to memorize but difficult to apply. Although I’ve edited this piece a dozen times I’m sure it contains imperfections. But trust me, it’s much better now than it was initially. The key is effort. Good writing matters, probably more than you think.

I hope you find these rules helpful, and through their application we’re able to understand each other a little bit better. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to read Orwell’s original essay. It contains many helpful examples and is, of course, a pleasure to read.

George Orwell Politics and the English Language

Mr Democracy

A written constitution for the UK (made in China)

Mr Democracy is an international solo project by Oliver Walker. The project was exhibited at The Royal Standard, an artist run space in Liverpool, from 19th September – 30th November 2008.
A container was hired for the project, and the vinyl lettering installed on the rear side.

Vinyl lettering (colour matched to the container) of the same size was installed on the stairwell inside the building, leading directly to the video installation on the first floor.
Photo: John O'Shea

Photo: Jemma Egan

The UK is one of only three countries in the world not to have a written constitution. In an ambitious international project exploring trade, democracy and globalisation, Mr Democracy undertakes the production of a UK constitution in China. Outsourcing content and production to China, the world’s fastest growing economy, Oliver Walker imports 1000 specially manufactured plastic toys into the UK that speak the new constitution.

See www.mrdemocracy.org.
The Mr Democracy exhibition consisted of a three channel video installation, and a shipping container outside. For the first four weeks of the exhibition the shipping container housed a flat screen monitor displaying the position of the original ship carrying the 1000 toys in real time, and for the remaining six weeks it stored and displayed the 1000 speaking dolls.

Democracy Research and Development
The constitution itself was developed in Shanghai, by 3 postgraduate constitutional law students from the East China University of Politics and Law. A brief was set and discussed, and the 3 lawyers were left to draft a new constitution for the UK, through research and broad sampling. The Chinese language version was then translated into English by an English and Law graduate.
Democracy Production
The constitution developed in Shanghai was then mass produced in the form of 1000 speaking dolls which speak the constitution when pressed (known as The New Constitution). The video documents work in 3 factories; the factory which produces the plastic molded toy (in Shantou, south China), one which makes the voice chip/circuit board for speaking the constitution, and a third which attaches and tests the voice chip (in Guangzhou, south China).
Importing Democracy
The New Constitutions were shipped back to the UK. The goods were packed into a container in Huang Pu port in Guangzhou, then transported by barge to Kwai Chung container base in Hong Kong, where it was loaded for the journey to Felixstowe.

history

"History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there." George Santayana

Friday, 21 October 2011

Henri Matisse at Walker Gallery

Matisse worked with almost total indifference through two world wars while maintaining his own world of balanced opposites, security, and comfort. Matisse believed that the audience for fine art is relatively small and comes from the educated bourgeoisie. Thus, for that audience, he strove to produce art that would have the same soothing effect as a good armchair for tired business professionals.

Henri Matisse (Dictionary of World Biography)

What is Contemporary Art?

Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

What is Contemporary Art? Issue Two

http://e-flux.com/journal/view/109

"In this way, the contemporary starts to reveal itself to be something like a glass ceiling, an invisible barrier that seals us together precisely by its very invisibility. We acknowledge one another, individual artists, certain cities, social scenes, a few collective tendencies that seem to arrive more as common interests than social projections, but nothing attains critical mass under any umbrella beyond “the contemporary.” It’s not so different from how we understand capitalism to work, through one-to-one relationships that are seemingly too small-scale to be complicit with anything, masking the hidden ultimatum of an innocuous protocol—if we begin to discern its shape, either it shifts, or we become obsolete: uncontemporary. But then perhaps that would not be such a bad thing..."

Sophisticated indeed…

This article like…my hard research about “democracy”…or “perfect society”… - brain storm and even more questions…

cuppa-tea at Walker Gallery today

Wednesday, 19 October 2011

Liverpool Academy of Arts and Alice

I study in ADA – Academy of Art. Till last year, when I actually began my course in this fascinating new LJMU building, I never knew that it was called the “Academy of Art” and I always wondered why has it got the same name as
the old Academy of Art on 36 Seel Street?”

I am familiar with the Academy of Art at Seel Street from my first year in Liverpool.

I accidentally found this old building called Academy of Arts, when I came to Liverpool and walked to explore the city. Liverpool was a very different city.
I was curious about the Academy of Arts, because I met a lady there who loves Alice in the Wonderland. I noticed the picture hung in her office that I really liked. The lady I met was June Lornie.
The painting was her art work. It was Alice in Wonderland image, from my childhood my most favorite book ever.

June said that she became a member of the Lewis Carroll Society in 2001 after Cheshire Life published an article about her series of pictures on Alice in Wonderland.

Each year the society picks a young girl to be ‘Alice’ and attend functions on their behalf. As part of this one of the members asked if Alice could come along and open an exhibition at the Liverpool Academy of Arts.

fragment of June Lornie's painting Alice in Wonderland

Alice in Wonderland book for me is understanding and explanation of the Roland Barthes theory from Death Of The Author as well. I do not care who the author of Alice’s stories when I read this book - I imagine how I fall into a rabbit hole and as if all the adventures seem to happened to me.

Alice in Wonderland Author : Lewis Carrol

English logician, mathematician, and novelist, best-known for his classic fantasy novels ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND (1865) and its sequel THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS, AND WHAT ALICE FOUND THERE (1871). Unlike other children's books of the time, written in the atmosphere of rigid morality of the Victorian era, the Alice books did not try to teach a moral message.

"I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, sir," said Alice, "because I'm not myself, you see."
--"I don't see," said the Caterpillar.
--"I'm afraid I can't put it more clearly," Alice replied very politely, "for I can't understand it myself top begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing."
--"It isn't," said the Caterpillar.
(from Alice in Wonderland)

Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson at Daresbury in Chesire. His father, the Reverend Charles Dodgson, was at that time Curate of the parish. In 1827 he had married his first cousin Frances Jane Lutwidge, Charles was their third child. Dodgson attended a Yorkshire grammar school and Rugby. At Christ Church, Oxford, he studied mathematics and worked from 1855 to 1881 as a lecturer (tutor). Dodgson's career in education was troubled by a bad stammer. He lectured and taught with difficulty and he also preached only occasionally after his ordination in 1861. "The hesitation, from which I have suffered all my life," Dodgson wrote in a letter, "is always worse in reading (when I can see difficult words before they come) than in speaking."

According to anecdotes, Dodgson was very shy and he even hid his hands continually within a pair of gray-and-black gloves. In 1867 he travelled with his friend and colleague Henry Parry Liddon to Russia, where they visited churches, museums and other places of interest. After this journey, he never again left Britain. Dodgson died on January 14, 1898. He was buried in Guilford Cemetery.

Oscar Gustave Rejlander. Lewis Carroll. 1863. Albumen print.
Rosenblum, Naomi. A World History of Photography. Abbeville Press, New York. 1989.

In spite of his stammer, Dodgson spoke easily with children, whom he often photographed, first with their clothes on. From July 1866, Dodgson began to take nude photographs, always with the permission of parents. During the next thirteen years, Dodgson took many nude studies, but before he died, he destroyed most the negatives and prints. Dodgson was careful not to show them to anybody, stating in a letter that "there is really no friend to whom I should wish to give photographs which so entirely defy conventional rules."

Dodgson had seven sisters. Although his attraction to young girls was well-known, he followed in their company the strict Victorian rules of behavior and morals, even if his feelings were more intense than he acknowledged in his diaries. He also had long friendships with mature women, but remained a bachelor. This side of his life has remained little examined. However, Karoline Leach has criticized in her book In the Shadow of the Dreamchild (1999) the Freudian mythology and the "strange incestuous kind of immortality" created around the author and the real-life Alice.

During one picnic – on July 4, 1862, on a blazing summer afternoon – Dodgson began to tell a long story to Alice Liddell (died in 1934), his ideal child friend, who was the daughter of Henry George Liddell, the head of his Oxford college. The Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was born from these tales. (SEE ALSO other adventures inside the Earth, Giacomo Casanova's Icosameron, 1788; Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth.) The friendship with the Liddell family ended abruptly in June 1863, two years before Wonderland was published, and Dodgson turned his attention to other young friends. According to some Oxford gossips, Dodgson had proposed marriage to Alice, aged eleven; for females the legal age to marry was twelve. However, the cause of the break between Dodgson and the Liddells is a mystery. Dodgson's relationship with the family remained formal, but in 1870 Mrs. Liddell brough Alice and her sister Ina to Dodgson's studio to be photographed. When Alice married Reginald Gervis Hargreaves in 1870, he gave the couple a watercolor of Tom Quad, one of the quadrangles of Christ Church in Oxford. Alice was absent from his funeral, no Liddells appeared.

Originally the book appeared under the title Alice's Adventures Under Ground. The story centers on the seven-year-old Alice, who falls asleep in a meadow, and dreams that she plunges down a rabbit hole, where finds herself first too large and then too small. She meets such strange characters as Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and the King and Queen of Hearts, and experiences wondrous, often bizarre adventures, trying to reason in numerous discussions that do not follow the usual paths of logic. Finally she totally rejects the dream world and wakes up.

The sequel Through the Looking Class, appeared in 1871. It is perhaps more often quoted than the first, featuring the poems Jabberwocky and The Walrus and the Carpenter. The artist John Tenniel refused to illustrate one chapter in Through the Looking Class because he thought that it was ridiculous. The chapter was published later in 1872 as The Wasp in a Wig. Dodgson himself always wished to be an artist and as a boy he illustrated all the manuscript magazines, which he made for his younger brothers and sisters. Dodgson's original drawings for Alice's Adventures Underground were published in 1961.

The author's life and work has become a constant area for speculation and his exploring of the boundaries of sense and nonsense has inspired a number of psychological studies and novels – and perhaps also the famous English philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. The humor of Joseph Heller's famous war novel Catch-22 (1961) is much in debt to Dodgson. In Catch-22 the story centers on the USAF regulation, which suggests that willingness to fly dangerous combat missions must be considered insane, but if the airmen seek to be relieved on grounds of mental reasons, the request proves their sanity. The same laws dominate the Wonderland: "'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.' 'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice. 'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'"

According to Carl Jung, "a typical infantile motif is the dream of growing infinitely small or infinitely big, or being transformed from one to the other – as you find, for instance, in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland." (in Man and His Symbols, 1964) Modern physicist have often compared the world of Lewis Carroll with the incredible phenomena of quantum reality – such as cats that are both alive and dead at the same time ('Schrödinger's cat') or with particles that change their identities for no apparent reason. They are against Alice's common sense: 'I can't believe that!' said Alice. '... one can't believe impossible things. But the White Queen has her own principles: "Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.' (from Through the Looking Glass)

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax -
Of cabbages - and kings -
And why the sea is boiling hot -
And whether pigs have wings."
(from 'The Walrus and the Carpenter')

At the time of their publication, Alice's adventures were considered children's literature, but now Dodgson's stories are generally viewed in a different light. His work has fascinated such critics as Edmund Wilson and W.H. Auden, and logicians and scientist such as Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. Virginia Woolf remarked, "the two Alices are not books for children; they are the only books in which we become children". In the 1960s rock musicians and hippies were attracted to the surrealistic world Wonderland, which inspired such songs as Jefferson Airplane's 'White Rabbit' and The Beatles's 'I am a Walrus'. Fredric Brown used Lewis Carroll's characters and lyrics in his novel Night of the Jabberwock (1950). In the 1990s Jeff Noon continued Alice's adventures in Automated Alice, in which she is transported to the modern world.

(source : www.kirjasto.sci.fi)

I looking forward to come to the TATE Liverpool to see new 'blockbuster' exhibition Alice in Wonderland

1898 The typography on this turn-of-the-century edition, which features one of John Tenniel’s original illustrations