The Elegant Variation: THE ONLY LOWER RUNG WOULD BE PLAGIARIZED FANFIC

TEV DEFINED

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."

April 25, 2006

THE ONLY LOWER RUNG WOULD BE PLAGIARIZED FANFIC

In the culmination of a story that's been brewing for a few days, Kaavya Viswanathan has 'fessed up to a little bit of harmless plagiarism ...

Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore accused of plagiarizing parts of her recently published "chick-lit" novel, acknowledged today that she had borrowed language from another writer's books, but called the copying "unintentional and unconscious."

The best word on this scandalette can be found at Maud's place.

Posted by TEV at 12:30 AM in Litlinks | Permalink

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Comments

The thing that I noticed, was the similarity of her defense to this classic case of young author plagiarism:

http://partners.nytimes.com/books/98/02/01/home/amis-novelist.html

Posted by: JD Salinger | April 25, 2006 at 06:45 AM

Why do people who are accussed of plagarism always the ones who calls it "harmless". What she did was wrong. Period. Let's see how many rush to her defense, or whether she's held up to a different standard because a) She's only nineteen b) She's attending Harvard c) Both

Posted by: Linda | April 25, 2006 at 08:00 AM

ah fabulous wonderful karma. this whole thing makes my day.

Posted by: SKL | April 25, 2006 at 12:17 PM

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April 25, 2006