The phrase "avoid pretension" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when advising someone to be genuine and not to act in a way that is overly self-important or showy.
Example: "In your writing, it's important to avoid pretension and speak in a way that feels authentic to you."
Alternatives: "steer clear of arrogance" or "eschew affectation.".
Reta's work is praised by those who deplore "the opaqueness of the contemporary novel" and commended for avoiding "convolution and pretension".
The first step, as McMahon instinctively knew, is to avoid taking very seriously the pretensions of either.
And while "FlashForward" seems to avoid (at least so far) the geeky pretensions of "Lost," which invite so much circuitous decoding, the date hardly seems arbitrary as it carries the symbolic weight of historic incident.
The EU is desperate to avoid being cast as the villain, both because it has a strong economic interest in a successful trade round and because its protectionist farm policies damage its pretensions to champion development in the poor world.
We managed to avoid the full length of the downward spiral on which I sent Mark and Nina, but, then again, we hadn't started out with their level of pretension.
Subjects performed these fast contractions until they had two attempts without countermovement or an enhanced pretension (both indicating anticipation of the subject and influencing the MRTD) just before the fast extension (de Ruiter et al. 2004) with a maximum of five attempts to avoid fatigue.
Ergo, according to Austin, we should reject that claims that (iii) and (iv) follow from (i) and (ii), and with them Moore's pretensions to have avoided the problem posed to (i) by determinism.
Even democratic governments with global pretensions have difficulty avoiding the emergence of an imperial presidency -- one which, though democratically elected, slips inexorably into non- or even anti-democratic practices in the defense of imperial power far away from its own shores.
She ran several funds, with respectable but not stellar results, and then she became a manager of the people who managed funds.Her lack of pretensions makes the nepotism of her promotion easier to swallowLike her father, Ms Johnson avoids publicity.
