Reading it properly again for the first time in literally around 30 years I'm astonished at how much I've taken its messages to heart in my 20+ year career.
To this day I have a downright visceral reaction against "pretentious diction", and as a fairly confident written communicator I find overly "clever" writing is to be mistrusted, not praised. There's a real Emperor's New Clothes thing going on with a lot of business writing.
Even though I don't particularly like Orwell's writing, I read the essay and it's good but parts haven't aged well.
For example, in the pretentious diction section he lists words like expedite, predict, extraneous, and clandestine as unnecessary words used by bad writers. I wonder if he were still around today, would he stand by that list?
