Politics and the English Language
Orwell's six rules for writing clear prose — never use a metaphor you have seen before, never use a long word where a short one will do, if it is possible to cut a word always cut it, never use the passive where you can use the active, never use jargon if you can think of an everyday equivalent, break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous.
The essay argues that unclear writing is not just aesthetically bad but politically dangerous — vague language enables vague thinking, and vague thinking enables bad decisions.
For product direction the rules are directly applicable to every product document, strategy memo and stakeholder communication you write.
Read alongside Strunk and White, Vonnegut, and Zinsser for the full writing shelf.
The essay is short, public domain, and should be reread twice a year.
Central argument
Orwell argues that the English prose of his time had become diseased by vagueness, pretension, and ready-made phrases, and that this decay is not merely aesthetic but political: unclear writing reflects and reinforces unclear thinking, which in turn enables the kind of moral evasion that allows atrocities to be committed or defended without appearing as such. His remedy is six concrete rules that prioritise the short word over the long, the active over the passive, the specific over the abstract, and the cut word over any word that can be cut. The central thesis is that clarity is an act of intellectual honesty, and obscurity is almost always a form of concealment — of bad ideas, weak reasoning, or bad faith.
Critique
Orwell's framework implicitly privileges a plain Anglo-Saxon register that can encode its own cultural biases — some disciplines and communities use technical or formal language not to obscure but to achieve precision that plain prose cannot, and his rules do not easily distinguish between productive jargon and mystifying jargon. There is also a tension in his argument: he treats linguistic sloppiness as a cause of bad thinking, but it is equally plausible that bad thinking — motivated by ideology, fear, or self-interest — produces the linguistic sloppiness, making the direction of causality less obvious and the writing cure less sufficient than he implies.
Why it matters for product
Product leaders produce a continuous stream of documents — strategy memos, roadmaps, OKRs, discovery readouts, stakeholder decks — where passive voice and abstract nouns ('leverage synergies', 'drive alignment', 'optimise the experience') routinely hide the absence of a real decision or a real owner, exactly the dynamic Orwell diagnoses. Applying his rules directly to product artefacts forces the writer to name who does what, what will actually change, and what the tradeoff is — the discipline of cutting and concretising a strategy memo is also the discipline of finding out whether the strategy is real. For a CPO, the clarity standard Orwell sets is also a team standard: if the documents coming up from PMs are vague, the thinking behind them probably is too.