>carrie says:
>
>I remember now that I had this thought about the
"Harry Potter" books.
>Heard Harold Bloom on NPR waxing philosophical about
how JK Rowling is a
bad
>writer because she used the phrase "stretch your
legs" too many times.
i think that in most cases prose should flow smoothly, with
the occasional stop-and-look that you mentioned in an earlier
post. and i guess i can see bloom's point, in that
oft-repeated phrases and words can potentially interrupt the
flow.
i remember coming to a screeching halt while reading wolfe's
_look homeward angel_, so that i could go back over the page
and count how many times he had used the word "gaunt" on it.
repeated and reworded phrases were a part of gertrude stein's
style ("a rose is a rose is a rose."), but near as i can
tell, it wasn't a big success.
vocabulary can get in the way, too. i can't remember what it
was, but i was reading something by norman mailer and all
them big fancy words made me wonder if he wrote the piece for
a doctoral thesis.
miker
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