George Orwell on Writing & Contest Result

Hello Everyone,

It's time to announce the winner of the recent sentence analysis contest. To recap, students were asked to analyze a sentence and explain what is the matter with it. Here is the sentence in question:

"Finally, the immersive world of online gaming has become a common hobby for young people."

But just before jumping into that, let's consider an excerpt George Orwell's 1946 essay, Politics & the English Language:

"...prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."

This sentence captures much of what is at stake when we discuss the current utility of ChatGPT, as well as how to best foster our own thinking and writing abilities. As several contest entries demonstrated, ChatGPT itself was not able to detect the basic incoherence of the sentence it had generated; whereas a concise, common-sense student response identified and explained the issue perfectly...

So on that note, let's take a look at the results of the contest.

Honorable shout-outs go to Alexander L. and Lillian K. for their responses.

And congrats to the winner: Dustin L
For his efforts, Dustin will be receiving the coveted $50 Steam gift card!

Dustin pointed out:
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"It doesn't really make sense to say that a location, such as "the...world" is a "hobby" since a hobby is an activity. That would be like calling the swimming pool a hobby as opposed to saying that swimming is the hobby."

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If we highlight the syntactic elements of the sentence (subject-verb-object), Dustin's point becomes clear:

The immersive world of online gaming has become a common hobby for young people.

So here we have a nice-sounding noun phrase in “the immersive world of online gaming” but there was no follow through, no care taken to make the entire expression coherent.

Assuming that we are committed to the phrase "the immersive world of online gaming" better would be:

The immersive world of online gaming is where more and more young people are choosing to spend their free time.

Or :

The immersive world of online gaming is where young people are choosing to spend more and more of their free time.

Or even:

Increasingly, the immersive world of online gaming is where young people are choosing to spend their free time.

All three of these options demonstrate more awareness and attention to detail on the part of the writer.

Which one sounds better?
Which one better conveys the idea you had in mind?
Which one is a more precise expression of the truth?
All questions for the revision process!

I hope you found this analysis interesting and thought-provoking. As an absolute nerd, I know I did.

Students, teachers and parents, let’s keep striving to think, and let’s provoke each other to do the same!

To conclude, I would like to leave you with some more words from George Orwell's essay:

"Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy."

And:

"A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But 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. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear."

~Nick Woolner & Team @ Guthry Island Education