Scrambled Paragraphs

This is one of the features I built for online activities that accompany a business communication textbook. The original activity's objective was the same as here: rearrange the sentences to unscramble the paragraph. The text comes from “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell. Have fun!

Paragraph 1

  • Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
  • Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.
  • Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse.
  • It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes.

Paragraph 2

  • A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.
  • Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.
  • But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.
  • It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language.
  • Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.
  • I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer.
  • The point is that the process is reversible.
  • Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.
  • If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.
  • It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.