Mark Tredinnick - The Little Red Writing Book-University of New South Wales Press (2006)

nurse. It was probably the same for you. But not all of them—these
partners, these old hands, these professionals—were using language
to make things clear.
Language is the chief means by which, as George Bernard Shaw
once wrote, the professions conspire against the public. Knowledge
is power. Opaque and difficult, imperious language is the best way
to hold onto knowledge and power. Language, which is by nature a
means of making meaning, of talking among ourselves, becomes in
many places a way of doing politics—it becomes the secret code of
a society or profession; it becomes the conventional expressions
employees and aspirants feel obliged to use, may even be forced to
use, to make it in a field or a firm. It becomes a way of not making
things clear, a tool for clever obfuscation, a way of hedging bets and
keeping one’s nose clean.
We all know when language is being used for politics. It’s hard
to understand if you’re uninitiated. It’s dense and vague. It’s abstract
and impersonal. It’s formal and cold or it’s falsely breezy. It’s heavy
on ideology and light on fact. It’s loud about ends but quiet about
means. It’s polysyllabic. It dwells on processes not people. It’s
passive. These are all fine ways to say nothing much at all while
taking a long time to say it.Writing like that intends not to include
but to exclude its readers. It means to deter them, not to invite
them in. Such writing is caution and self-interest run amok. Its
roots go down to fear and, deeper still, in some cases, to an instinct
for keeping hold of one’s secrets.
Good writing needs to transcend politics. It needs to rise above
fear. It must, within the limits of professional care and political reality,
speak plainly to its readers, aiming to say as much as possible, as
economically as possible. Good writing must be everything that fearful,
political writing is not—it must be humane, plain, active, informal,
concrete, clear and specific. It must have a voice. It must have a life.
Here are the things George Orwell thought writers should do to
save their prose from politics.
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