In his biography of Orwell, Michael Shelden called the article "his most important essay on style",[REF] 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 [REF].
An article from 1981, Carl Freedman's 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"[REF] that is argued for in Orwell's essay.