Last week the students in my Writing Close to the Earth online class read George Orwell's classic essay, "Politics and the English Language." In it, Orwell makes the case that vague, abstract, usually Latinate language is an important tool in the dishonest politician's tool-belt. 

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

If you've read more than two or three issues ofThe Habit, you are probably aware of my ongoing campaign against vague, abstract language. I agree with Orwell that fuzzy, imprecise language fosters the kind of fuzzy, imprecise thought that allows the worst kind of politician to flourish. 

But lately it has occurred to me that my exhortations to clear, concrete storytelling are incomplete. If storytelling is the most effective vehicle of truth (and I believe it is), it is also, and for the same reasons, the most effective vehicle of falsehood. "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity," Orwell wrote. True enough. But that doesn't mean that all clear, concrete, specific language is sincere.

Storytelling, whether fiction or non-fiction, has a unique power to reframe a reader's or listener's sense of reality. It says, in effect, "I know you have a lot of ideas about the story you're living in, but consider the possibility that you are living in a different story altogether."