If someone asked me a month ago if I would
consider George Orwell a revolutionary of diction, I would not have known how
to respond. The only knowledge I had of
him was regarding works like Animal Farm and 1984. His piece on “Politics and the English
Language,” however, has greatly altered my perception of quality writing. Though originating in 1946, its truths may be
more relevant today than ever. His words
fit well with my reflection a few posts ago on keeping academic and technical
forms of writing accessible.
In my field of study, there are several conflicts with Orwell’s rules
against linguistic obscurity. The
biggest issue is the use of active voice.
As we discussed in class, engineering is one of many disciplines where
active voice is to be avoided. This
keeps the first person, or any person, out of a scientific undertaking. It is also difficult to avoid jargon in such
a complex and technical discipline. This
could be remedied by spending more initial time explaining such concepts. Ultimately, engineering values a forthright
communication of accurate information without pretentious diction or
meaningless fluff, a desire for clarity and concision shared with Mr. Orwell.
Use of language in this manner is often an attempt to sound more
intelligent. This could fit with more
academic and scholarly writings; however, this course of action typically has
the opposite effect. By George’s
admission, less can be much more. The
greatest communicators understand that what detracts from reader understanding
can be detrimental to writing itself. In
an effort to incorporate lavish dialect, the true meaning of a piece
can be lost in translation.
In application of Mr. Orwell’s ideas, I have created the following
meme. It reflects a passage of text from
a scholarly article that I reviewed in research for our action plan
assignment. The quote: “While the use of
this 50% value may not be exact for every other city and for the specific time
of consideration (August 15), it has been used in this study as a baseline
value which may in fact be conservative for a summer day and not an annual
average value,” is a bit overwhelming. This project involves
researching the potential for energy conservation by liquid cooling
servers. This line is critical as it
deals with their decision of a baseline temperature, the basis of validity for
their entire experiment. Unfortunately,
this line appears to second-guess the decision made and does not necessarily reinforce
the validity of its criteria. This
creates doubt in that validity for the reader, which is damaging to their case. It may have been better to admit postulation,
if that is indeed what it was, and discuss how the value was determined. This line leaves ambiguity and adds little to
the discussion.
Citation of Quote: Iyengar, M., et al. “Extreme Energy Efficiency Using W
ater Cooled Servers inside a Chiller-Less Data Center.” Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems (ITherm), 2012 13th IEEE Intersociety Conference. May 30 2012 - June 1 2012. Print. DOI: 10.1109/ITHERM.2012.6231424