Notes on Orwell's "Confessions of a Book Reviewer"

Notes on Orwell’s “Confessions of a Book Reviewer”

The complete essay is some six or seven pages long and is about books; I excerpted four paragraphs for you for examining description.

I rendered the excerpt into the MLA essay format, conscripted Mr. Orwell into your class, and arbitrarily assigned this excerpt the fictional date of 28 August; Mr. Orwell did indeed write “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” in 1939, but I don’t know the date.  Another modification was to italicize the titles of the books mentioned, which is the current usage; Mr. Orwell wrote them in all caps.  The ellipsis is indicated by three dots (…); the writer does this to indicate to the reader that he (in context, “he” is gender-neutral) has left out part of the original text.       

Note that in the MLA essay format every line, top to bottom, is double-spaced.  There is no of bold print or different type faces.  Use this format.  Your grandparents were probably taught The Chicago Manual of Style or other formats when they were in high school, but we will work with the current academic usage. 

Even if you were not told the date and writer you could infer much about the date and origins of this essay: “Bed-sitter” is English for a one-room apartment, the English say “cigarette end” where we would say “cigarette butt,” and fewer folks smoke now.  “Moth-eaten” is very much a cliché for something old, few people still use typewriters, and telephones that ring are now rare.