What are Orwell's six rules of writing?

They close his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, in this order. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech you are used to seeing in print. Use the short word where a long one is not needed. Cut any word you can cut. Prefer the active to the passive. Throw out the foreign phrase, the scientific term or the jargon word when an everyday English equivalent exists. And sixth, break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. The first five take things away and the sixth hands the judgment back, which is why the list still works as a revision pass rather than as a style.

What type of writing is George Orwell known for?

Two political novels and a body of documentary essays, and the essays are where the style was built. Animal Farm came out in 1945 and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949. Before them he published three books of first-hand reporting: Down and Out in Paris and London on poverty, The Road to Wigan Pier on the English industrial north, and Homage to Catalonia on the Spanish war. The essays writers borrow from are Politics and the English Language, Why I Write, Shooting an Elephant and A Hanging.

What influenced George Orwell's writing the most?

By his own account in Why I Write, political purpose. He lists four motives for writing, sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose, and says the books he wrote without the fourth came out lifeless. The experience behind that is specific. He policed Burma for the empire, lived among tramps and dishwashers in Paris and London, went underground in a working pit, and fought in Spain, where a sniper shot him through the throat in 1937. His reading shows too. He wrote at length on Swift, Dickens and Kipling, and Animal Farm sits in the fable tradition he found in the first of the three.

Which of Orwell's six rules is hardest to follow?

The first, because a borrowed figure of speech does not feel borrowed. Ring the changes on, toe the line, stand shoulder to shoulder, no axe to grind: he lists these as dying metaphors, phrases used because they save the writer the trouble of inventing anything. They arrive fluently and they read as competent. That is what makes them hard to see in your own draft. His test is visual, so ask whether the image is fresh enough to raise a picture, and if you cannot picture it, the phrase is filler in the shape of an idea.

Does Orwell's plain style work in fiction as well as in essays?

It works differently. In the essays, plainness is a claim about honesty. In the novels it is characterisation, because the flat register of Nineteen Eighty-Four belongs to a man whose job is rewriting old newspapers and who has been trained out of noticing things. Animal Farm goes further and borrows the register of a children's book, which is why its cruelty reads so cold. The style has less to offer his realist novels, which reach for interior weather and social comedy that a voice built for testimony handles awkwardly.

How do you write plainly without sounding flat?

Put something in the sentence. Then vary the length. His paragraphs run a long sentence into a short one, and the short one lands because the long one earned it. Read the result aloud, which is what his sixth question is for. A page that is dull to say out loud is dull on the page, whatever the rules say about it.

Fiction Non fiction

George Orwell Writing Style

Born June 25, 1903 – Died January 21, 1950

Analysis by Draftly's editorial team · Updated August 23, 2026

George Orwell wrote plain, active English on purpose, and the six rules he published in 1946 are a checklist you can run over your own draft.

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Writing Style Overview

Writing style overview of George Orwell: voice, themes, and technique.

George Orwell's writing style is plain English held to a standard he wrote down himself: short words, concrete nouns, an actor in front of every verb, and a claim a reader could go and check. He set the standard out as six rules at the end of Politics and the English Language, published in 1946. The essay matters more than the list. It shows the failure the rules were built against, which is prose assembled out of phrases the writer had not chosen and does not examine.

His demonstration is the Ecclesiastes swap. He takes the verse about the race not being to the swift, and about time and chance happening to them all, then rewrites it in modern official English until "objective consideration of contemporary phenomena" stands where the men and the races and the chance used to be. Nothing in the second version is inaccurate. It has lost its pictures. That is the fault he catalogues four ways in the same essay: dying metaphors, verbal false limbs, pretentious diction, and words that have stopped meaning anything.

In the fiction the same discipline does character work. Nineteen Eighty-Four opens on a bright cold day in April with the clocks striking thirteen, and the hallway of Winston's block smells of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. Two ordinary observations and one impossible one, all in the same register. That register is how the book trains you to stop noticing. Animal Farm runs the trick backwards, repainting a commandment on the barn wall until the word equal has a comparative attached to it.

Imitation fails in a predictable place. Plainness copies easily and precision does not, so the sentences come out short and vague at the same time. Where Hemingway cut to leave a gap for the reader to fill, Orwell cut until there was nowhere left to hide. The test of a finished Orwell sentence is whether you could argue with it.

How to Write Like George Orwell

Writing techniques and exercises to emulate George Orwell.

1
Take one page through his six rules
Print a page you have already revised and read it six times, once per rule. First hunt the figures of speech you have seen in print before. Then the long words with short equivalents, then the words you can cut, then the passives with no actor, then jargon. The sixth pass gives things back, because his last rule licenses breaking any of the first five rather than writing an ugly sentence, and a page that obeyed all five without judgment usually needs the rescue. Do it once by hand. After that you start catching most of it while you draft.
2
Run the Ecclesiastes swap both ways
Take a paragraph of your own and translate it into the worst official English you can manage, the way he translated the verse from Ecclesiastes into a sentence about objective consideration of contemporary phenomena. Two things come out of it. The bad version is easy to write, which tells you how little thinking it takes. And your original turns out to contain three or four phrases the bad version had no need to touch, because they were already written in that language. Those are the ones to attack. Then translate back, and keep whatever survived both trips.
3
Put the actor back in front of the verb
Search the draft for was, were and being. Most hits are harmless. The ones that matter are the sentences where something has happened without anybody doing it, which is where the fourth rule bites, and the fix is either a subject who could be summoned to court or an open admission that you do not know who acted. Rewrite them one at a time. Watch what a paragraph does when its subject is a person rather than a process, and notice that the sentence usually gets shorter as well as harder to dodge.
4
Unpack one euphemism a day
Find a phrase in this week's news that covers an action instead of describing it, and write the plain sentence underneath. The plain version comes out shorter, and it names a body. Keep the two lines side by side. The habit trains an ear for the same move in your own drafts, where it shows up as an abstract noun standing in for a decision you made and would rather not defend in front of the person it lands on.
5
Ask his six questions before rewriting
Before touching a sentence, put the questions he says a scrupulous writer asks: what am I trying to say, what words will express it, what image or idiom will make it clearer, is that image fresh enough to have an effect, could I put it more shortly, and have I said anything avoidably ugly. Four of the six are about meaning and two about form. Answer them in order. Half the rewrite is decided before you move a single word, and the last question is the one writers skip, which is why so much competent prose is unreadable aloud.
6
Go and get the fact first
His essays sit on legwork. He washed dishes in Paris, slept in London casual wards, went down a coal mine in the north of England, and took a sniper's bullet through the throat in Spain before writing the books that use those places. You do not need a war. You need one thing per argument that you saw rather than assumed, specific enough that a reader could check it. Get that thing before you write the sentence. The plain style stops sounding thin the moment it has a fact to carry.

George Orwell's Writing Style

Breakdown of George Orwell's writing style: sentence structure, tone, pacing, and dialogue.

Sentence Structure

Most of his sentences run subject, verb, object, with the qualifications hung off the end instead of buried in the middle. That is why they read fast. He writes long ones too, strung on plain connectives, so a long sentence in Homage to Catalonia still arrives one clause at a time and asks you to hold nothing in suspense while it finishes. Then he stops. The short sentence after the long one carries the finding. The lines people quote back at him all have that shape: the clocks were striking thirteen, some animals are more equal than others.

Vocabulary Complexity

Two of the six rules are about word choice, and both push downward. You can watch him run the rules over a real vocabulary in the same essay, where bombing villages and machine-gunning cattle comes out as pacification, deportation becomes rectification of frontiers, and killing people becomes elimination of unreliable elements. He objects to any word chosen because it sounds official, whatever its roots. The point holds in reverse, because Newspeak is built from Anglo-Saxon stumps like ungood and doubleplusgood and is still a machine for making thought smaller.

Tone

The voice does not rise. In A Hanging he watches a prisoner walk to the gallows and step around a puddle, and the flattest sentence in the essay is the one that follows the puddle. The flatness is the argument. Years in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma taught him what official calm sounds like, and he turns it around: the worse the fact, the more level the report of it. The anger sits in which facts he chose.

Pacing

The essays move on a fixed rhythm of specimen, diagnosis, rule. The fiction paces differently. Animal Farm compresses a year into a paragraph when little changes, then slows to a single afternoon for the windmill vote and for the van that takes Boxer away. Nineteen Eighty-Four spends its middle in a rented room and its ending in one cell. He hurries over systems. He slows down over bodies.

Dialogue Style

Speech in Orwell is evidence of what a speaker is still able to think. Squealer talks in figures none of the animals can check, the sheep drown out the rest, and the arguments on the farm are settled by volume long before anyone gets to logic. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Syme is happy. He explains over lunch that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought, and he says it in the tone of a man describing good work. Winston's own speech thins as the book goes on. By the end he is agreeing out loud with a sum he can see is wrong, and the novel closes by telling you he loved Big Brother.

Descriptive Approach

He describes in order to classify. In The Road to Wigan Pier the clogs of the mill girls clatter over the cobbles before dawn and the factory whistles blow, and the detail that fixes the town is that he slept through them. Down and Out in Paris and London is built the same way, out of the plongeur's sink and the swing door between a clean dining room and the kitchen behind it. Each detail tells you who is comfortable. Dickens piled objects up until a room was crowded, while Orwell picks one and lets it hold a class position. That is how a glass paperweight with a piece of coral inside it ends up carrying a whole strand of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Signature Writing Techniques

Signature writing techniques George Orwell uses across their work.

Specimen, then diagnosis

He quotes the bad writing in full before he explains it. Five passages of published English open Politics and the English Language, each one sourced, each one left intact so the reader can watch it fail without help. Only then does he name the faults. The order is the whole trick, because a rule handed over first is an opinion and the same rule handed over after the evidence is a conclusion the reader has already reached on their own. Use it in any piece where you intend to tell somebody they are doing something wrong.

The plain sentence underneath

Set the official phrase beside the act it covers, then leave the subtraction to the reader. His line about political language being designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable is this tool compressed into a sentence, and it earns its keep because he supplies the plain version each time instead of asserting that one exists. The failure mode is half the job: you name the euphemism and let the reader guess what it hides.

Words tested for meaning

He stops mid-argument to ask whether a word still means anything. Democracy, freedom, patriotic, realistic and justice get listed as words whose meanings cannot be reconciled with one another, and Fascism as a word reduced to signalling something not desirable. The stop buys him something concrete. Arguing in a fog is impossible, and clearing it costs one sentence: state the sense in which you are using the term, and then keep that sense wherever the term turns up again in the argument. Readers relax when a writer does this, because someone who defines a word can be pinned down.

One object, one class

A single thing carries a social position, chosen so that no commentary is needed. The tripe shop in Wigan with lodgers upstairs. The plongeur's sink. Winston's varicose ulcer. The technique needs restraint, because a second object of the same kind halves the effect of the first, and the object has to be one a reader can place without being told what it means. Pick the thing that could belong to that life and to no other.

The witness who is implicated

In the first-person essays he is one of the people in the wrong. He is the policeman in Burma who fires the rifle. He is the lodger taking notes on the family who put him up. Placing himself inside the fault does two jobs at once, since it removes the reader's easiest objection and it makes the judgment that follows harder to file under somebody else's business. The cost is real. You give up the safe position, and drafts of this move fail when the writer confesses to something flattering instead of something small and true.

Rule six

The sixth rule keeps the other five usable and gets quoted least. He wrote it because a checklist obeyed without judgment produces its own kind of bad prose, the kind that is correct and dead. His own pages break the rules where breaking them is right. Homage to Catalonia is thick with party acronyms and political jargon, because the argument it makes about who was fighting whom in Barcelona cannot be made without them. Keep the rule that tells you where the rules stop.

Literary Devices George Orwell Uses

Literary devices that define George Orwell's style.

Beast fable as argument

Animal Farm is subtitled A Fairy Story, and the subtitle is a working instruction. Talking pigs let him state a political sequence in the order it happened, with no room for a reader to plead special circumstances. The form comes down from Swift, and it can do something a realistic novel cannot. A pig repainting a wall is legible to a child. A reader who has followed the repainting has accepted an argument about how a regime edits its own history, without having been asked to accept anything.

Invented language with a manual

Newspeak works because it is specified rather than named. The appendix sets out how the vocabulary shrinks, how ungood replaces bad, how plusgood and doubleplusgood replace a shelf of adjectives, and Syme states the purpose in dialogue: narrow the language and you narrow what can be thought. Doublethink handles the psychological half, since a mind that holds two contradictory beliefs at once and knows it has already given up. Both are portable. Any story about power over people needs a mechanism for what those people are allowed to say, and this one gets borrowed more than any rival because it was engineered instead of gestured at.

Understatement at the worst moment

The device is litotes, and he reaches for it exactly where a lesser writer raises the volume. Shooting an Elephant describes the animal's death at length and gives the narrator's motive in one dry clause about not wanting to look a fool in front of a crowd. The gap between the size of the event and the flatness of the report is where the reader's judgment goes. Because he has left the room, the judgment feels like theirs. Raise the voice and you take it back.

The slogan that gets edited

Orwell writes slogans that change while you watch. Four legs good, two legs bad becomes four legs good, two legs better. The commandment that all animals are equal acquires a clause about some being more equal. In Nineteen Eighty-Four the three Party slogans hold still and the meanings under them move instead, so that war is peace stops being a paradox and turns into an accurate description of a state that needs a permanent war to stay upright. The device is cheap to build and hard to answer, because the reader remembers the earlier version and the characters do not.

Imitation Mistakes

Common imitation mistakes when copying George Orwell.

Reading plainness as licence to be vague

Five of the six rules only take things away, which makes them easy to obey while saying less than before. Cut the long words from a sentence with nothing in it and you get a short sentence with nothing in it. What holds his plainness up is underneath the words: a date, a place, a name, a number of hours worked. Test yourself on his openings rather than on his rules. Animal Farm opens with Mr Jones locking the hen-houses for the night and being too drunk to remember the pop-holes, which uses short common words and is completely specific, and the specificity does the work the shortness gets credit for.

Treating the six rules as a ban list

He put an escape clause at number six, and broke the first five himself when it suited the sentence. Good prose is like a window pane, from Why I Write, is a figure of speech. The rules describe a default rather than a law. Imitators go wrong by obeying the first rule so hard that the prose loses its pictures, which is the exact fault the essay was written to attack, since a worn-out metaphor is bad because it has stopped raising an image and a fresh one is worth having. Keep the metaphor you invented. Drop the one that arrived ready made.

Borrowing the anger without the reporting

Tone is the easiest part to fake and the least use on its own. Read the passage in Homage to Catalonia where he lists the five things that matter in trench warfare, firewood, food, tobacco, candles and the enemy, and puts the enemy last. That ranking is a report from a man who was cold. It is also what licenses the judgment he passes later, because he has shown you the ground he stands on. Copy the judgment without the trench and you have written a column. Readers feel the difference.

Coining a Newspeak word and stopping

Satirists have been minting words that end in speak ever since, and the coinage was the smallest part of it. What he built was a grammar. Nineteen Eighty-Four carries an appendix on the principles of Newspeak, with rules for how verbs and adjectives are formed and a stated aim of narrowing the range of thought, and the novel then gives the reader a man who loves the work of destroying words. The invention persuades because it is consistent. A coinage on its own is a wink, and a wink tells the reader you already agree with each other, which is the one thing his prose refuses to do.

Books

Explore George Orwell's books and discover the stories that shaped their writing style and voice.

Homage to Catalonia
Homage to Catalonia
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Animal Farm
Animal Farm

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about George Orwell's writing style and techniques.

What are Orwell's six rules of writing?: They close his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, in this order. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech you are used to seeing in print. Use the short word where a long one is not needed. Cut any word you can cut. Prefer the active to the passive. Throw out the foreign phrase, the scientific term or the jargon word when an everyday English equivalent exists. And sixth, break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. The first five take things away and the sixth hands the judgment back, which is why the list still works as a revision pass rather than as a style.
What type of writing is George Orwell known for?: Two political novels and a body of documentary essays, and the essays are where the style was built. Animal Farm came out in 1945 and Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949. Before them he published three books of first-hand reporting: Down and Out in Paris and London on poverty, The Road to Wigan Pier on the English industrial north, and Homage to Catalonia on the Spanish war. The essays writers borrow from are Politics and the English Language, Why I Write, Shooting an Elephant and A Hanging.
What influenced George Orwell's writing the most?: By his own account in Why I Write, political purpose. He lists four motives for writing, sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose, and says the books he wrote without the fourth came out lifeless. The experience behind that is specific. He policed Burma for the empire, lived among tramps and dishwashers in Paris and London, went underground in a working pit, and fought in Spain, where a sniper shot him through the throat in 1937. His reading shows too. He wrote at length on Swift, Dickens and Kipling, and Animal Farm sits in the fable tradition he found in the first of the three.
Which of Orwell's six rules is hardest to follow?: The first, because a borrowed figure of speech does not feel borrowed. Ring the changes on, toe the line, stand shoulder to shoulder, no axe to grind: he lists these as dying metaphors, phrases used because they save the writer the trouble of inventing anything. They arrive fluently and they read as competent. That is what makes them hard to see in your own draft. His test is visual, so ask whether the image is fresh enough to raise a picture, and if you cannot picture it, the phrase is filler in the shape of an idea.
Does Orwell's plain style work in fiction as well as in essays?: It works differently. In the essays, plainness is a claim about honesty. In the novels it is characterisation, because the flat register of Nineteen Eighty-Four belongs to a man whose job is rewriting old newspapers and who has been trained out of noticing things. Animal Farm goes further and borrows the register of a children's book, which is why its cruelty reads so cold. The style has less to offer his realist novels, which reach for interior weather and social comedy that a voice built for testimony handles awkwardly.
How do you write plainly without sounding flat?: Put something in the sentence. Then vary the length. His paragraphs run a long sentence into a short one, and the short one lands because the long one earned it. Read the result aloud, which is what his sixth question is for. A page that is dull to say out loud is dull on the page, whatever the rules say about it.

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