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  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."
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« LICKING OUR WOUNDS | Main | TEV REPORT: DAVID FOSTER WALLACE READING »

November 05, 2004

BAD OMEN

So we're on our way out the door to catch tonight's DFW reading but not before reading his review of the Williamson Borges bio for Sunday's Times, and it's just replete with the kind of annoying, excessive footnotey nonsense that drives us to despair with him.  Yes, we know you're a smarty, and yes, we know you're prolix but come on.  Does anyone think this kind of thing is still cute?

Or are we just being unreasonably crabby?

Not a promising start.

Posted by TEV at 05:48 PM |

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Tracked on November 05, 2004 at 06:40 PM

Comments

I'm back from the thing - I thought: http://www.litwack.org/injection/archives/000951.html

You?

Posted by: geoff | November 05, 2004 at 10:59 PM

I grant you prolix - Julian Barnes tilting at Sartre's biography of Flaubert is a lot more fun ( in Something to declare, Picador 2002). But he does have a point, that kind of bio is annoying.

Posted by: genevieve | November 06, 2004 at 06:01 AM

I actually liked the review, though I thought it sounded at least one wrong note: "Think about it--the personal lives of most people who spend 14 hours a day sitting there alone, reading and writing, are not going to be thrill rides to hear about." That's a great sentence up until those last three words.

Posted by: Ron | November 06, 2004 at 09:23 PM

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