On Avoiding Cliches like the Plague While Not Reinventing the Wheel

A cliché in the middle of a great piece of writing is like a 99 cent bottle of wine at a million dollar gala: it can seriously marr an otherwise great piece of work. Most writers – good writers – can get away with throwing in a cliché here and there, and sometimes, clichés actually work. More often than not, however, they appear trite and cheap – in other words, like a cliché. I’m not trying to be snooty – snotty – here. I’m the biggest critic of my own writing, and I am about as cliché guilty as anyone can be. In fact, that’s why I decided to write this: to share some of the ways I have gone about getting rid of clichés in my own writing. They still pop up, and I still miss them, but I’ve gotten better, and so can you.

Let’s face it: when you get in a good rhythm and are enjoying what you are doing, you don’t want to stop to contemplate what’s coming out on the page. And that’s okay. Catching clichés at the end, during proof reading and editing, is usually the best place to do it.

Identifying clichés isn’t always cut-and-dry. Most clichés are either trite metaphors couched as ancient wisdom, or figures of speech that might have been clever or humorous at one point, but are now just tired and overused. Sure, some phrases are blatantly cliches. Any reference to a morbidly obese gorilla or the length of time it took to build the capitol of Italy, for example, are clearly overused enough to be avoided. Others, however, aren’t so clear. Phrases like "step on your toes," "on the other hand," or the potential cliché I used in the first sentence of this paragraph, have entered into common usage to the extent that few people bat an eye at them. Ultimately, whether or not to use a potential cliché is a judgment call, and there is nobody that can say you can’t use one. However, when you start deliberately searching for them during editing, if you’re like me, you’ll likely find many more than just one.

The great thing about finding clichés in your writing is that they are great opportunities to make your writing more vibrant and interesting – by inventing your own non-cliched clichés. Remember, most clichés were, at one point, considered clever or funny, and were so clever or funny that they were overused to the point that they are no longer clever or funny. Thus, by identifying a cliché that probably flowed naturally into your writing, you have an opportunity to insert something that really is clever or funny in its place, and have that non-cliched cliché flow naturally into the article like the cliché used to. The new phrase doesn’t have to be the comedic moment of the century. In fact, it doesn’t even need to be funny. It just needs to be something different. If you wrote a cliché into your article, chances are readers are expecting a cliché there as well. A phrase as simple as a play on the cliché itself, or a play on the topic of the article, works well to add some vibrancy and originality to the article.

That being said, here are three examples of clichés that drive me bananas. This list isn’t exhaustive – there are web sites out there that are dedicated to clichés, believe it or not, and I couldn’t list every single cliché here. But below you will find what three of the most annoying, to me, and three that seem to be especially common Internet writing. This is also where I get to be a little snooty, because hey, it’s fun sometimes.

Trainwreck: This phrase is usually used in movie reviews. Every bad movie is a "trainwreck" of a film. I have no doubt that comparing a lousy movie to a smashed up locomotive was once very original and probably funny, but surely there are other apt metaphors that convey the opinion that a movie was terrible.

Something, and Something, and Something, Oh My!: It’s not that I mind cute pop culture or classical references. You might even recognize one in this article. However, if you ever find yourself tempted to title an article based on this Wizard of Oz quote – you know, where you substitute the "Lions," "Tigers," and "Bears," with three things that one wouldn’t expect Dorothy to have said, thus being clever – just stop. Please.

On…: I’m not sure when it became trendy to title articles or essays with a prepositional phrase – it was long before any of us were born -- but it’s pretty well run its course. Yeah, I get it: if you title anything "On ," we’re going to get your deep, philosophical beliefs about some subject. And sure, it’s very direct – there can’t be much doubt about what your essay is on since you titled it on something. But really, if you’re not going to come up with a creative title, is the "on" necessary? If you are writing an essay on, say, religion, does "On Religion" convey something that simply "Religion" doesn’t, other than, perhaps, pretention?

If you read this whole article and picked out a bunch of clichés that I didn’t intentionally highlight, then great! I’m still getting the hang of it myself. Picking out clichés is just one aspect of editing your own work, and frequently, it takes someone else to point them out to you.

Maybe someone will point out that an article about clichés could be a cliché itself.