Good prose is like a windowpane

Welcome to my new blog about language and communications. If you don't know me, I'm Nicholas Mayes and I work as an editor in the education sector in Scotland (teaching those who teach how to teach how to write). My background is in journalism, public relations and parliamentary reporting.

There are already some excellent guides on how to use grammar and plain English online. I hope instead to use this blog as a space for exploring how we communicate: the ways we communicate well and the (often amusing, often annoying, and sometimes dangerous) things that happen when we don't. I plan to share any insights my day job offers, and to give my take on anything that catches my eye in the news. I hope you'll offer some thoughts of your own in the comments.

The title of this post, by the way, comes from a quote from my linguistic and political hero (the two overlap a lot), George Orwell:

'One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.'

We need not write with a political purpose to avoid these traps, but we do need to write with some sort of purpose. I would offer three simple rules before putting pen to paper:

• Decide what you want to say.
• Decide who you want to say it to.
• Decide the best way of saying it to them.

Once you've done this, you can go about following the advice Orwell offered in Politics and the English Language:

• Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Follow these rules, and your communications will stand out from the meaningless, decorative, purple humbug that makes up so much of what we read and hear every day.