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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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February 17, 2005

WITH ALL THAT TIME TO THINK, THEY COULDN'T HAVE COME UP WITH A BETTER NAME?

The International Herald Tribune looks at Glasgow's Aye Write! festival, and the city's overall place in the landscape of Scottish fiction.

It is home to Liz Lochhead, arguably Scotland's best playwright; Alasdair Gray, the novelist who broke the mould with Lanark; and James Kelman, the nation's only Booker Prize winner, whose work has changed the way readers beyond our borders view the Scottish novel.

Posted by TEV at 12:05 AM |

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