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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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July 11, 2006

A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT 2006

Hooray!  It's Bulwer-Lytton time again.  Fortunately, our book wasn't finished in time to be in contention, lest we have to compete with the likes of this:

"Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean," Guigli wrote.

"The judges were impressed by his appalling powers of invention," said Scott Rice, a professor in SJSU's Department of English and Comparative Literature. He has organized the bad writing contest since its inception in 1982.

Visit the official site of the annual bad writing contest here.

Posted by TEV at 12:27 AM in Litlinks |

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I'm still irked that my entry from last year didn't even gain one of the seemingly hundreds of honorable mentions they gave out. Witnesseth:

He looked up into the sky overhead, where you can see clouds that looked like mounds of mashed potatoes—not the perfectly-formed fake Potato Buds kind but the kind made by his mother, lumpy and often cold—you’d think that his mother, such a perfectionist and maintaining such high standards and disappointed in everything he did, wouldn’t settle for lumpy and cold, but there they were, in the sky overhead.

Posted by: Pete | July 11, 2006 at 07:12 AM

I'm still trying to picture eyes saying that you can dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean. If I came across that line somewhere, I'd be paralyzed-- I wouldn't be able to go on. In fact, even this much is going to plague me for the rest of the evening. sigh.

Posted by: renee | July 11, 2006 at 05:52 PM

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