The themes in "Politics and the English Language" anticipate Orwell's development of Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four.[8] Michael Shelden calls Newspeak "the perfect language for a society of bad writers... because it reduces the number of choices available to them".[10] Shelden says that Newspeak first corrupts writers morally, then politically, "since it allows writers to cheat themselves and their readers with ready-made prose".[10]