Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-04-24/Essay

In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, Naaman Zhou approvingly cites this Wikipedia essay on the problems caused by elegant variation. The essay was first posted in May 2018 and written by 27 other editors. You may edit the essay, but please do so at Wikipedia:The problem with elegant variation, not here.

Elegant variation is the attempt to relieve repetition by replacing words with synonyms. For example:

• "Three homes were destroyed by a five-alarm fire yesterday. Neighbors reported the blaze about 4 pm. Two firefighters were injured battling the inferno. Officials called the conflagration suspicious."
• "Pope Paul waved from the balcony. As the Supreme Pontiff raised his hand, it became apparent that the Holy Father‍'s glove had a large black stain, causing great embarrassment to the Bishop of Rome."

The English lexicographer H. W. Fowler coined "elegant variation" as an ironic criticism of this strategy. Elegant variation distracts the reader, removes clarity, and can introduce inadvertent humour or muddled metaphors. It can confuse readers who are unaware, for example, that the Pope is the Bishop of Rome. It fails to fix the real cause of repetitive prose, which is usually repeated information, not repeated words.

Some newspaper writers were famous for overusing synonyms:

Elegant variation is often less absurd than in the examples above – for example, writing "the singer" instead of "Michael Jackson". It's often used to avoid repetition that arises from other problems, such as needlessly complex syntax: a case of treating the symptom and not the cause. Fixing elegant variation isn't always a case of removing flowery language, but making prose clearer and tighter overall. In other words, using plain English.

Elegant variation is often used on Wikipedia in reference to individuals – for example, writing "the director" instead of "Spielberg".

Here's a passage from an old version of the article about Bubbles, a pet chimpanzee once owned by Michael Jackson. The elegant variation is bolded:This presumably emerges from an attempt to avoid repetition. But the English language already has a solution for repetitive nouns: pronouns (he / him / she / her / they / them / it). When a pronoun isn't clear, just use the original word. In 99% of cases, the result is perfectly natural:

Elegant variation can reduce clarity and introduce confusion, as in this excerpt from the article on the film Taxi Driver:

Scorsese, De Palma, and Schrader are all directors – so which director does this refer to?

This example of elegant variation, from the article about the band Pavement, makes the sentence difficult to comprehend:

Who was the auxiliary percussionist? It was Nastanovich himself – a fact mentioned several thousand words earlier in the article, so good luck if you missed that.

Elegant variation is sometimes used to add information with the purported advantage of avoiding repetition. This is rarely the clearest way to provide the information.

For example, the following passage from the Beatles article tells us that George Harrison was 15 when he met John Lennon:

This requires the reader to work out who "the fifteen-year-old" refers to (made especially difficult here as, in the previous sentence, McCartney is also described as being fifteen). It's simpler and clearer to introduce information in a logical, sequential way:

"The latter" and "the former" are rarely the best solution to repetition. For example:

Without "the latter" and "the former", the sentence feels repetitive:

This is an example of how repetition usually emerges from repeated information, not repeated words. As it stands, the sentence structure requires us to state the subjects (Sarah and Louise) twice. We already know who the subjects are, so this is repeated information.

The solution is to restructure the sentence:

The word "title" is sometimes used as a synonym for media such as movies, magazines, and particularly video games. For example:

The classic Mega Man series consists of ten main titles. It seems to have been absorbed from press releases and video game journalism (reliable sources of bad writing). This is an example of the specialised style fallacy – in other words, copying the writing style of specialist sources without considering Wikipedia's general readership.

"Title" removes information and creates ambiguity. For example:

• Sega announced the title Sonic Colors could mean that Sega announced the game or the title of the game.
• Resident Evil titles might refer to the Resident Evil films, games, or both.

Why be imprecise? Be clear and direct and write "game", "film", etc instead of "title". Or remove the word entirely where possible:Sega announced Sonic Colors.

Consider this sentence:

This likely derives from a fear of repeating the word "Batman". But replacing the second mention with words such as "titular", "eponymous" or "title character" only adds redundancy. Readers can see when a word or phrase is in the title – we don't need to tell them. What's more, this makes the wikilink destination less clear (see WP:EASTEREGG).

Be clear and direct:

In articles about adaptations of works with the same title, it's common to wikilink using something like [[article title|of the same name]] or [[article title|the eponymous novel]]. For example:

There are numerous problems with this:

• It's extremely conspicuous - its only function is to avoid repeating the original term, and so is uncomfortably close to actually writing "I am avoiding repeating the name here".
• It's often longer than the term it replaces.
• It can make it unclear what exactly is being referred to.
• It's a cliche.

The solution isn't necessarily obvious. For example:

This isn't ideal, because it isn't clear where the wikilink novel leads: the novel Under the Skin, or the article about novels generally?

Writing out the name in full is clear:

It may be clunky, but it beats "of the same name", which tries to mask clunkiness with worse clunkiness.

Two other possible solutions are to include "the" or a year in the link text.

Including "the" in the link text makes this unambiguous:

Similarly, including the year in the link text provides a clue that it leads somewhere other than the novel article.

This comes at the cost of obscuring the name of the novel. That's OK if the context suggests the film and novel share the name, as in the example above.

Alternatively, we could use two sentences to reduce the sense of repetition.

• Second Mentions, a Twitter account documenting examples of elegant variation