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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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January 12, 2008

NBCC FINALISTS

This year's NBCC Award finalists are now available for your perusal at Critical Mass, along with Lizzie Skurnick's live blogging of the announcement ceremony.

The fiction list is:

Vikram Chandra, Sacred Games
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao
Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men.
Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravediggers Daughter.
Marianne Wiggins, The Shadow Catcher.

We're awfully pleased to see Alex Ross's superb The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century make the criticism finalist.

Posted by TEV at 07:47 PM in Prizes, Prizes and More Prizes |

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THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

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