The phrase "a small spate of" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a brief period during which something occurs in a relatively small quantity or frequency.
Example: "There was a small spate of complaints about the new policy, but most employees seemed satisfied with the changes."
Alternatives: "a brief surge of" or "a minor increase in".
As seems to happen in American publishing, there was one of those 20-year moments when a small spate of books appears, all with variations on a theme.
There's also a small spate of proper compositions, including the jittery title track, by Mr. Lossing, and a restful elegy by Mr. Hebert called "For A. H".
Hence, a small spate of Web sites that guide patients and families through this sensitive territory, including The Conversation Project (founded last year by Ellen Goodman, a former syndicated columnist) and the more recent Prepare (produced by Dr. Rebecca Sudore, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco).
THE popularity of "The Devil Wears Prada" -- both the execrable novel and the so-so movie -- spawned a small spate of what might be called assistant lit: books about monstrous bosses and the humiliations their underlings endure as the price for proximity to the powerful.
HORROR is among the most durable, if disreputable, American movie genres, and Halloween, which always generates at least a small spate of horror films, is the best time to check its vital signs, to determine whether it's really alive or just stubbornly, annoyingly undead.
Meanwhile Last.Fm was the centre of a small spate of controversy recently when it turned off a few subscriber stations that, the company said, weren't strictly DMCA compliant.
In part, that is because of the extraordinary demand during a smaller spate of earlier census hiring.
These larger waves of layoffs were preceded by a smaller spate of firings earlier this summer which saw 250 employees let go from the company's Waterloo R&D and product testing facility.
Under the Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul, hedge funds large and small face a spate of new bureaucratic mandates that take effect in July.
Robert Hawk, a special agent in the F.B.I. office in Cleveland, said in a telephone interview yesterday that the letters to the N.F.L. players were a small part of a spate of hate mail directed at notable African-American men over the past two years.
The violence was the deadliest in a recent spate of small-scale attacks in Kazakhstan, a mostly Muslim former Soviet republic in Central Asia where such bloodshed used to be rare.
