In "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell gives a bunch of _opinions about the Soviet Union that I've seen discussed extensively here and on the internet at large.

However, what about the writing advice itself? Putting the political opinions aside, is he right about how to communicate effectively?

Personally I like a lot of what he has to say, even if a good chunk of it basically boils down to "don't be lazy". I particularly agree with what he has to say about words with no clear definitions:

"The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning."

I do think that he overstates his case at a lot of points, though. Like sure, language can have an effect on how people behave, but he makes these apocalyptic predictions about a "degradation" in language leading to actual, political authoritarianism, and that just seems incredibly dubious, at least from a modern perspective. This seems to reflect the liberal perspective where the primary cause of political change is people winning and losing arguments.