Politics and the Englisj Language - Response

Iara Fernal
Christy Vance
English 102

This week's reading was the text 'Politics and the English Language' by George Orwell. This essay focuses mainly on the issue of the English language being modernized, and accordingly to the author this modernization process is giving people bad habits towards our language - specially the written language.
In the essay Orwell gives the readers examples of phrases written by professors which contain perfect examples of pre-made sentences that have lost their original meaning throughout time; and also how writers need to watch out for what type of words they use. Several people, when writing a passage, do not even think about what a specific word means - just because such a word might sound nice or look cool they will add it to their paper without even bothering to look the word up in the dictionary.
The main point the author is trying to make is to show his readers how the English language is changing - to worse - and to teach how to prevent such a thing from happening. One can conclude from this text that Orwell is hoping that his essay will help readers realize that using a long and fancy word is not at all better than using a short, straight forward one. Using difficult words does not make the writer seem smarter, it just makes the reader more confused.
This text really relates to what we are doing in class at this point in time - which is writing an argument paper. After reading essay I feel like I am a lot more prepared to work on my project, I feel like I can relax a little and not try to use fancy words throughout my paper and it will still ad good as or even better than an argument paper full of long and difficult words.