Other critics like Richard Lanham note that the writing Orwell decries has found not only a home but a function in contemporary academe, if not in other places. But Orwell's examples make it clear that he is concerned with a particular kind of bad writing, and he is fairly explicit about its features. Orwell is explicit about these features in his list at the end of the article and in the text. Long words, long clauses and phrases, foreign vocabulary, Latin and Greek, and passive voice all come under his interdiction. By abstract nouns I mean nouns that are formed from verbs or adjectives.
Creation is formed from create , for instance, and curiosity from curious .
The outstanding characteristic of abstract noun phrases is that, as Chomskyan linguistics has taught us, they are all really sentences. Curiosity killed the cat has buried in it the cat was curious . The assassination of the president caused political chaos contains someone assassinated the president . True, some abstract nouns like darkness are so common they require little untangling. But in Orwell's travesty, consideration, conclusion, success, failure, activity , and tendency each stop the reader and back him up to untangle the syntax and renegotiate the meaning of the sentence.