Here is your assignment. Paraphrase the following paragraph from Averil Gardner's George Orwell, his entry about Nineteen Eighty-Four's author in Twayne's English Authors Series Online. Be sure to type your paraphrase and bring it to class. The point of this exercise is to begin the process of learning to paraphrase effectively. I expect that you will not do it perfectly, so the key is to try to your best to paraphrase, and not to stress about plagiarizing it. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to get in touch with me.
Orwell drafted his earliest notes for what became Nineteen Eighty-Four some time in 1943, under the heading "The Last Man in Europe." He had in mind at that time a book in two parts; firmly established already were the notion of the "Two Minutes' Hate," the protagonist's relationship with two other characters, and a future society based on "organized lying," in which "objective truth" had disappeared. These last phenomena had first become apparent to Orwell during his time in Spain when, in his view, the P.O.U.M. [a left wing anarchist group] was systematically misrepresented, and many of his essays of the 1940s are haunted by the recurrent fear that history was vulnerable to alteration for political ends.
