literillation

Literillation is a term found in some literary theory discussions to describe the hypothetical process of extracting literary quality from text through iterative refinement. The word blends littera, Latin for "letter," with the suffix -illation, echoing distillation to suggest purification and concentration of form.

Practically, literillation refers to a workflow where prose is drafted, revised, and stylized to preserve content while enhancing rhythm, imagery, and rhetorical effect. It involves choices about diction, sentence length, cadence, and the use of devices such as alliteration, parallelism, and metaphor.

In contemporary usage, literillation may be discussed as both manual technique and computational concept. Writers perform several drafting passes to distill ideas and voice, while some AI-assisted approaches describe transforming plain prose into more literary variants according to learned models or rules.

Because literillation is not a standardized term, its exact meaning varies by author and context. Critics warn that it can be vague and that emphasis on form may overshadow substance or reflect subjectivity in judgments of what is "literary."

Nevertheless, the concept provides a framework for thinking about how prose can evolve through deliberate, iterative editing and stylistic shaping toward heightened expressive quality.