The phrase "a plain tale of" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when introducing a straightforward or uncomplicated story or narrative about a particular subject.
Example: "In her latest book, she shares a plain tale of love and loss that resonates with many readers."
Alternatives: "a simple story of" or "an honest account of".
The knowingness slowly fades, however, and what could be a plain tale — and is in danger of becoming a sappy one — grows surprisingly inward and dense.
He feels that the Sangam literature is, for the most part, a plain unvarnished tale of the happenings of a by-gone age.
Van Sant gussies up the plain tale of a quadriplegic cartoonist (Joaquin Phoenix) with visual guile, but viewers will revel in the character's rocky route.
In "A Grand Day Out" (1989), Park managed to rocket Wallace and Gromit one man and his dog to the moon and back in twenty-three minutes, whereas the new movie takes more than an hour longer to tell a plainer tale, topped with a lighter scattering of laughs.
The courtship he imagines is very uneventful and if it was told without the frame of Wes's imagination, it would be a very plain tale.
Her Plain Tales - a series of interviews with "ordinary" woman - won Ireland's premier television award, the Jacobs, in 1985.
The influence of Plain Tales is easily discernible in the work of Isaac Babel and Ernest Hemingway, who also worked as journalists.
Yet there is something both engaging and unique about Jeff Nichols' plain-spoken tale of youngsters learning hard lessons about the nature of love and the darker side of the adult world.
One of Kipling's most famous innovations is his use of dialect, which begins agonisingly with the 'Oirish' of Private Mulvaney in Plain Tales, but which he honed into a powerful storytelling tool.
This new collection of stories, "East Into Upper East: Plain Tales From New York and New Delhi," written over the last 20 years, reaffirms her as a spellbinding urban fabulist.
