In his biography of Orwell, Michael Shelden called the article "his most important essay on style",[10] while Bernard Crick made no reference to the work at all in his original biography, reserving his praise for Orwell's essays in Polemic, which cover a similar political theme.[11] John Rodden asserts, given that much of Orwell's work was polemical, that he sometimes violated these rules and Orwell himself concedes that, if you look through his essay, "for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against".[12] Rodden also says that Terry Eagleton had praised the essay's demystification of political language but later became disenchanted with Orwell.[13]
Linguist Geoffrey Pullum—despite being an admirer of Orwell's writing— dismissed the essay as “dishonest” and criticised it for "its insane and unfollowable insistence that good writing must avoid all phrases and word uses that are familiar".[14] Orwell's admonition to avoid using the passive voice has also been criticised. Merriam–Webster's Dictionary of English Usage refers to three statistical studies of passive versus active sentences in various periodicals, stating: "the highest incidence of passive constructions was 13 percent. Orwell runs to a little over 20 percent in 'Politics and the English Language'. Clearly he found the construction useful in spite of his advice to avoid it as much as possible".[15]: 720
Introductory writing courses frequently cite this essay.[16] A 1999 study found that it was reprinted 118 times in 325 editions of 58 readers published between 1946 and 1996 that were intended for use in college-level composition courses.[17]
In 1981, Carl Freedman's article "Writing Ideology, and Politics: Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language' and English Composition" set in motion a "wide variety of critiques, reconsiderations, and outright attacks against the plain style"[18] that Orwell argues for. The main issue found was Orwell's "simplistic faith about thought and language existing in a dialectical relation with one another; others quickly cut to the chase by insisting that politics, rightly considered, meant the insertion of an undercutting whose before every value word the hegemony holds dear".[18] These critics also began to question Orwell's argument for the absoluteness of the English language, and asked whose values and truths were being represented through the language.
Louis Menand criticized the essay in a 2003 retrospective of the author in The New Yorker, saying that Orwell "makes it seem that the problem with fascism (and the rest) is, at bottom, a problem of style," that "ugliness has no relation to insincerity or evil, and short words with Anglo-Saxon roots have no relation to truth or goodness." Menand continued, "All politics, (Orwell) writes, 'is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.' And by the end of the essay he has damned the whole discourse."[19]
Orwell's writings on the English language have had a large impact on classrooms, journalism and other writing. George Trail, in "Teaching Argument and the Rhetoric of Orwell's 'Politics and the English Language'", says "A large part of Orwell's rhetorical approach consists of attempting at every opportunity to acquire reader participation, to involve the reader as an active and engaged consumer of the essay. Popular journalism is full of what may be the inheritance of Orwell's reader involvement devices".[20] Haltom and Ostrom's work, Teaching George Orwell in Karl Rove's World: 'Politics and the English Language' in the 21st Century Classroom, discusses how following Orwell's six rules of English writing and speaking can have a place in high school and university settings.[21]
