PR pros: Leave the thesaurus on the bookshelf

Did you ever have an English teacher tell you not to use the same word twice in a paragraph? If so, he or she was encouraging you to use “elegant variation,” a practice as misguided as the ban on starting a sentence with a conjunction.

Elegant variation occurs when a writer uses synonyms simply to avoid repeating the same word. Here’s an extreme example:

Bananas are a good source of potassium. Eating this elongated yellow fruit can also provide you with Vitamin C.

A less extreme example:

Four of the defendant’s witnesses were women, while all of the plaintiff’s witnesses were ladies.

Charles W. Morton—humorist, author, and long-time editor of The Atlantic Monthly—wrote that the problem with elegant variation “lies somewhere between the cliché and the ‘fine writing’ so dreaded by teachers of English Composition. … It does bespeak an author who wishes to seem knowledgeable, and versatile. … It can also bespeak an author who is merely pompous.”