The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith

Example 1.13

They stood

under the big tree

and talked slowly

Under the tree

they stood

and slowly talked big

The big tree

stood slowly

and under they talked

They stood big

and slowly talked

the tree under

The big tree talked

and they slowly

understood

‘Under The Tree’ (Lysenko 1998, p. 27)

Substitution

Another way of changing the phrase is by substituting one word for
another. In the following example either the word ‘death’ or ‘author’ is
replaced by another word:

Example 1.14

the death of the author

the death of autumn

the death of the daughter

the death of the century

deleting the author

the author’s orbit

death authorised

the demise of the orchestra

Most writers work with substitution as a way of improving on words
which are linguistically weak. However I am attempting here not simply to
find synonyms of the words, but to alter the sense of the phrase, to allow

12 The Writing Experiment