Shitty politics, shitty use of the English language, and shitty first drafts

Long title, but the word shitty is just fun to write. After reading the article on first drafts, I had a bit of personal reflection on my own writing style, particularly with short stories and story ideas, and how I often drop them simply because I get frustrated with the poor quality of what I was writing. It's sort of made me want to pick some of them up again. All in all, I liked the personal feel of the article, and how she narrated her own experiences. It reminded me of my own writing sessions, so being able to relate helped a lot.

As for Orwell's essay, I'm amused by his arguments, mainly because he follows them himself. He's not a hypocrite, or by any means an idiot. I know that I'm guilty of a lot of the proverbial sins he mentions, not only in writing, but in everyday writing. This was a serious problem for me back in high school, particularly for English and History essays. Frustrated my teachers to no end, and I kept getting low grades. I've learned to scale back, but every in a while, I slip up and tend to sound arrogant or pretentious.

Another interesting bit was that he looks beyond mere grammatical errors and examines even the abuse of Latin and Greek word origins. He analyzes words that are used incorrectly not just because of definitions, but because they have prefixes or suffixes attached that do nothing for the prose. One thing he did leave out entirely in his analysis was laziness, which is the main problem in Internet conversation. People don't want to bother typing out an entire word, so they use Netspeak. Texting on cellphones, where there is often a character limit, or using online chat in order to convey a necessary message in as small amount of time as possible might be necessary. However, using it when you have time to read your message out and edit such as forum posts or Facebook messages is simply laziness and, in my opinion, one of the main causes of the degradation in the English written language today, 50 years later. Also, the way some kids speak these days is just plain annoying, but that's just my inner old man telling them to get off my lawn.

P.S. Edit: I need to learn to write less...