The Case for and Against Elegant Variation

In a new article in the New Yorker, Naaman Zhou runs down the pros and cons of what writers call “elegant variation.”

The Case Against
The Fowlers, whose early attempts to codify English are still followed by many sticklers, coined “elegant variation” sarcastically and described it as “false elegance” and “cheap ornament.” On Wikipedia, you’ll find an instructive essay titled “The Problem With Elegant Variation.” “Elegant variation distracts the reader, removes clarity, and can introduce inadvertent humor or muddled metaphors,” it says. Or, as the Fowler brothers put it, in 1906, “These elephantine shifts distract our attention from the matter in hand.”

The Case For
According to Kristen Syrett, a professor of linguistics at Rutgers University, people are instinctively drawn to elegant variation, or “second mentions,” because of a well-documented concept called the repeated-name penalty. This is a cognitive phenomenon, part of the way human minds process language. “If I say to you, ‘Jane walked into the living room, Jane picked up a book, Jane started to read the book’... that causes a delay in reading time,” Syrett said. Indeed, psycholinguists have conducted experiments with eye-tracking technology, where they watch the eyes of their subjects stumbling over these names and scanning back. The body stutters. This response, Syrett said, is “encoded in our brain” — it applies as much to Japanese as it does to Spanish.

When Elegant Variation Makes Sense

A client recently asked me to edit a document about sales figures. One of the first things that stood out was the repeated use of the words “increase” and “decrease.”

What a letdown, especially with a subject like numbers, where the writing can quickly get repetitive. One of the great virtues of English is that it’s brimming with synonyms.

To be sure, you don’t want to succumb to what Fowler called “elegant variation” — unnecessarily swapping out a perfectly good word (like “said”) for another (“uttered”) solely to avoid repetition. But you do want to take advantage of the different meanings between, say, “decrease” and “plunge,” between “increase” and “skyrocket.”

Here’s a quick list of alternatives:

Decrease
call
crater
dive
drop
fall
plunge
shed
slip
tumble

Increase
balloon
grow
jump
rise
shoot up
soar
spike

Teachers! Please don’t make your students use synonyms for “said,” he opined

Take it away, Gabriel Roth:

“Replacing the word ‘said’ with ‘colorful’ or ‘lively’ synonyms is a ubiquitous symptom of bad writing. Individual instances are usually redundancies: ‘I’ll never cheat again!’ is recognizable as a promise without ‘he vowed’ after it. But a procession of ‘she explained’ and ‘he chuckled’ and ‘I expostulated’ — the reporting verbs that clog your dialogue when you follow the ‘never say said’ rule — is worse, because they force the reader’s attention away from the content of the writing and onto the writer’s hunt for synonyms ... Successful writing modulates the lavishness of its diction for effect, rather than cranking the dial all the way to maximum floridity and leaving it there.”