Sunday, December 15, 2019

If it sounds like writing ...

"Iconic Detroit novelist" is a properly formed Elongated Yellow Fruit, sure, but "iconic" needs an analytic category all its own. Especially when you have two of them in the first five lines of a blurb about a movie, and double-especially when it's about the writer who would have advised you to "leave out the parts that readers tend to skip."

The "iconic" plague is persistent in these parts. We seem to have trouble writing about Buddy's Pizza without it. Here's Dec. 5:
 And Dec. 7:
If we could summon him with an eight-square Buddy's and a six-pack of Stroh's, Elmore Leonard might remind us that if an institution is genuinely iconic, you're wasting time to remind people. But he might just file that under the broader admonition that if stuff sounds like writing, you should rewrite it.

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1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Great post! I always enjoy the iconic haedsup blog.

7:17 AM, December 20, 2019  

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