Does Pulitzer Prize winning journalism follow Orwell's Rules for Writing?
For our NLP final project, we investigated if Pulitzer Prize winning journalism follows Orwell's 6 rules of writing:
- Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
- Never use a long word where a short one will do.
- If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
- Never use the passive where you can use the active.
- Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
- Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
We defined parameters around how to address each of these rules in python, and created an interactive dashboard displayed at the final presentation. Details about our project can be found on our github repo.