George Orwell - On Writing

Someone recommended this short essay to me to improve my writing. It is extremely well-written and best of all, easy to understand. Here are a few lines that stuck with me:

• The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.
  
• A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions:
  
  (1) What am I trying to say?
  (2) What words will express it?
  (3) What image or idiom will make it clearer?
  (4) Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
  
  And he will probably ask himself two more:
  
  (1) Could I put it more shortly?
  (2) Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
  
• The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image.
  
• ...political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.
  
• When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find—this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify—that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten to fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
  
• But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
  
• Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.
  
• ...one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
  
  (1) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
  (2) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
  (3) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
  (4) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
  (5) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everday English equivalent.
  (6) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
  
• Language [is] an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought.
  
  
  

Millionaire thoughts of the day

Thanks to Mitubhai:

• People who say they want to become a millionaire but are unwilling to back it up with hard work are only fooling themselves.
  
• If you want to be wealthier, start thinking like you’re already there.
  
• If the financial advice you’ve been getting hasn’t proven itself effective, then toss it out and rebuild your financial beliefs from ground zero. If you want to become a millionaire in 10 years or less, you can’t subscribe to the 40-year skimp-and-save approach. Sure you can save your way to a million in 40 years, but you can earn your way there a lot faster.