[Anthony-G]

I’m an admirer of the writing of George Orwell so I thought it would be fitting to paste the first two paragraphs of his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language”.

It suggested removing a number of modifier phrases. These phrases were not redundant and removing them would result in loss of important detail, information and/or emphasis. In some cases removing those words would result in nonsensical or syntactically incorrect sentences. Further experimentation showed that it complained about “mostly” and “many” as modifiers but not “some”.

It highlighted a number of long noun phrases but none of these could be suitably shortened, and Orwell’s uses of the passive voice were mostly appropriate; re-phrasing these to be in the active voice would result in awkward prose. Its left branching sentences were not rambling at all.

On the plus side, I thought its highlighting of long sentences worked well but not all long sentences are difficult to parse and a succession of multiple short sentences can have an unnatural rhythm. It also failed to take into account that colons and semi-colons can be used to separate main clauses.

I wouldn’t use it myself, but I can see how it could be a useful tool for considering how a sentence can be rephrased and encouraging awareness of the issues it highlights.