Most of us surely enjoy the benefits of having access to the vast digital literature at our disposal. Yet, today’s writing amplifies an old problem: writing that expresses very little is now too much writing with even less meaning. If you find yourself complaining about run-on or unnecessary sentences, needless clarifications and obvious statements, you would be in good company. Even in the pursuit of knowledge, the researcher is often frustrated with having to work hard to understand or cut through the jargon, the endless, uninspiring template writing, and indecorous clichés. It seems that access to the abundance of written information has driven insight and meaningful ideas further out of reach.
These are not the grievances and frustrations of people who romanticize language — these are the grievances and frustrations of people who yearn for less fluff and more substance. Or it might be a simpler practical wish that more writing would just get to the most insightful parts more directly. There is an entire genre of books about meaningful communication that’s fresh and clear, and it’s been picked up by experts on language for the beleaguered and frustrated. Pick up a random book on the art of writing and it will devote an entire section on clarity and conciseness. In academic writing, too, one finds manuals and reference books for scholars beginning their academic careers where writing is the main medium of communicating research. There’s even an entire book dedicated to the difficulty of writing clearly. Just Being Difficult (Jonathan Culler & Kevin Lamb, 2003) is a compilation of essays about academic writing in the public arena. One recurring argument is that some academic writing is hard to read because the subject is a difficult one. Nevertheless, not all words that are devoid of meaning are the product of how much effort was put into producing them. Sometimes, great effort is applied to avoid substance and meaning altogether, in an effort to reduce liability, especially in politics or, for example, when a corporation is dealing with a public relations disaster.
What these books on writing try to resolve is the impoverished use of language, which I describe as expressing less meaning and slavish recourse to ready-made expressions. The point is that it is easier to let depthless thoughts flow through ready-made expressions, because reflection and careful writing require effort. So when we conform, thoughtlessly adopting ready-made sentences, one’s genuine voice is lost — or never heard — in the familiar pre-arranged sequence of words that call only a passing interest unto them; noticed one moment, forgotten the next.
In 1945, George Orwell wrote the Politics and the English Language with a mind to criticize the regrettable turn of modern English in the public sphere of his time. For Orwell, an impoverished language comes with a cost that is more than aesthetic — it’s also political. Orwell’s insight — that formulaic writing is lazy and requires less thought — is worth dwelling on in our current context. Today, the borrowing of “ready-made” expressions and sentences is popular thanks to content creators incentivized to produce constantly in order to maintain an online presence. They need to produce fast and frequent content — not the typical conditions for thoughtful writing. The issue arises when you combine more meaningless writing with an uncontrolled proliferation of it, you bury the sought-after insight in a forbidding heap of words. And by concealing meaningful text under the morass of superficial content, you have an epistemic environment that’s polluted and, if Orwell’s right, ripe for control and manipulation.
Much of human knowledge is now stored in capacious databases and processed by powerful software designed to ingest unfathomable amounts of data. Sometimes surprising patterns are discovered, but mostly they are spurious correlations[1]. The trouble is that these correlations can masquerade as knowledge or insights, but, in fact, they are neither. We can make a simpler observation: taken together, there’s a great number of texts containing words and expressions so anemic that they waste the reader’s time with imperceptive content. When one considers what we are currently witnessing in the written word across all modern media, Orwell’s observation is not far-fetched.
What we are witnessing is a proliferation of bots that create content effortlessly on the behest of humans. Its prose is the product of probabilities of sequences of words. The choices these bots have is, in theory, limitless, but they are nonetheless limited to databases, no matter how vast. They cannot access the minds of humans unless humans commit their thoughts in writing on some digital medium. These sleepless technological contraptions will continue to churn out content by incentivizing people to forgo creating their own. From this perspective, it would be incorrect to claim that literacy is dead because. Since more writing is produced at unfathomable rates than ever before, human writing will represent an ever-shrinking fraction of the content out there in the world. The urgent question we’ll need to answer is whether we will still remember how to write when we realize what human writing does for the human psyche. For those who want to prioritize human writing over AI slop[2], who do not want their voices to be drowned out by the mindless proliferation of text, can hearken Orwell’s advice, as we shall see below.
What would you call this eagerness to reach out for ready-made sentences and prêt-à-penser opinions? Whether you call it cognitive miserliness[3], or laziness or whatever one chooses to call rushed, shallow writing (whether human or bot-generated), they all reinforce that human predilection to adopt predigested opinions that flatter our immediate intuitions about a topic of some controversy. The motivation to form one’s own opinion is often dampened by the effort required to form a genuine one. Powerful, then, is the incentive to expend less energy and browse for an already-formed opinion. Little effort is needed to select a ready-made opinion because the social media we use today will also curate an array of opinions expressed by personalities based on your history of searches, making the entire process effortless. This process reinforces the path of least resistance with effortless scrolling of rich visual content, whereas longer texts take more effort to write and read. What I want to impress upon readers is the simple and perennial principle, ascertained by human experience, that achieving good things takes effort.
Orwell’s advice is a much-needed antidote and defence against the onslaught of specific technologies that are designed to do the thinking for us. He blends his advice with rules for clearer writing, which paves the path to sovereign thinking[4].
Orwell offers the six rules in the form of questions. “A scrupulous writer,” he advises, “in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
First, What am I trying to say?
The question forces the writer to think about purpose. Why does this sentence need to be articulated? To answer this, the writer must first think about whether you have something to say and then, why you think it ought to be said. You may answer that you don’t know, or that you have nothing of consequence to say. This is already a sign of good thinking. Mary Midgely, a celebrated philosopher and accomplished author, wrote the first of her 18 books at the age of 60. When asked why it took her so long, she answered: “I didn’t know what I thought before then.”[5] Eventually, we all have something to say, and the more we think about it, we grapple with its implications. The thought becomes clearer and clusters into a cohesive system of thought. Its need to be shared will be known by how appropriate it is to its time.
Once articulated with the words that express it (the second piece of advice), the better the world would be for having heard or read it.
In the same vein, Orwell offers the next question: What image or idiom will make it clearer? The best writing advice will always include the exhortation of using concrete language that evokes images in the reader’s mind. In the context of computer-generated text and AI, it turns out humans have a superior ability in conjuring powerful images in the minds of their readership. A writer steeped in the tradition of language will wield idioms more competently than the simulacra currently produced by AI.
This is especially relevant for the fourth question Orwell advises us to ask: Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? Orwell offers an example:
By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash – as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot – it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words, he is not really thinking. (Orwell, 1946, p. 10)
The passage underscores the deep connections between mental images and the quality of human thought in comparison with what one might get from AI-generated text.
Finally, Orwell suggests two more questions the adept writer should ask himself. Could I put it more shortly?
The skill of saying more with fewer words is arguably the most laudable one. One infuses more meaning in one’s writing or speech by carefully chosen words. When arranged together, one trades vagueness for clarity without sacrificing depth. Granted, it takes practice to master this skill, but it is one that is within every apt writer’s reach. When what you write has neither depth nor mastery over the things you are discussing, your sentences are tentative and over-hedged, articulating much but, in fact, saying little and leaving your reader unimpressed with the message you intended to convey.
The final question the writer should ask is: Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?”
Eloquence is also a skill that comes with practice and a deep familiarity with the language and its literature. However, eloquence is insufficient. Beautiful writing and speech should also be respectful of the reader, and to respect the reader, one must write truthfully and transparently in a way that edifies the reader and earns his trust that you’ve written thoughtfully.
“But,” Orwell provokes his reader with a the concluding remark, “you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself” (Orwell, 1946, p. 13).
Those still interested in writing original work will heed Orwell’s advice, as well as advice from other eminent writers in all languages. But for those preferring expedience, the ticking of boxes, inserting a prompt in Orwell’s captivating passage, his is not only writing advice, it’s thinking advice. Had readers never read Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, they would be forgiven for thinking that the text was written in response to today’s proliferation of AI slop, because this is precisely what we are doing when we eagerly insert a prompt: we abdicate our thinking to a chatbot.
Thinking is hard work and the issue of rushed content writing in short, easy-to-consume texts is not a generational problem, but a tension in the human experience: we desire to be independent, critical thinkers, but we also don’t always want to do the hard work involved in thinking. We ran into trouble when we chose the latter over the former; and the price we pay, warns Orwell, is our freedom of thought.
Perhaps we’re paying too much attention on the novelty and seemingly immediate threat of artificial intelligence, in its various forms. We may, instead, be missing the bigger picture that the debasement of language and the subversion of truth through the spread of distracting nonsense and outright lies began a very long time ago, and what we’re witnessing today is its acceleration through the various means and media at our disposal. Do not mistake this as a call for calm vis-à-vis the threat of AI. Quite the contrary, our passivity will be blamed as the pinnacle of complacency if we did nothing. However, mustering all our efforts to combat the epistemic pollution that is caused by the latest iterations of artificial intelligence technology alone will not solve the problem because the problem has existed since time immemorial. This is a battle between truth, on the one hand, and falsehood, on the other, and the latter recruited superficial writing is its active ally. To bolster the forces of truth, we must add the counterbalance: writing that is thoughtful and meaningful. We achieve it only when it is genuinely aligned with a view of reality.
[1] See: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=uzk7UxAAAAAJ&citation_for_view=uzk7UxAAAAAJ:u5HHmVD_uO8C
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/hottest-job-in-tech-writing-words-ai-hiring-2026-2
[3] (Deng and Deng, 2025)
[4] I use sovereign instead of “independent” because the author of your thoughts is you. The thinking has not been delegated to a chatbot or other third party.
[5] Midgley, M., & Cave, S. (2023). Are you an illusion?. Routledge.
