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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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June 11, 2008

REASON 4,633 TO GET TO PARIS

The third annual Shakespeare and Company literary festival.

Book469

With a line up of authors that includes Paul Auster, Jung Chang, Hermione Lee, Amélie Nothomb, Marjane Satrapi and Jeanette Winterson, the festival looks set to embrace the memoir genre while tackling that most ticklish of literary topics: Where does fiction end and non-fiction begin?

Oh, hell.  Like we need a reason.  (Photo: William Simon)

Posted by TEV at 12:30 AM in Obsessions |

Comments

I live a fifteen minute walk from S & Co, and yet I'm stuck in Tokyo for the summer! The gods are cruel!

Posted by: maitresse | June 11, 2008 at 04:24 PM

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