The war against cliché
Image: Cliche Carving via PhotoPin (licence)
If there’s one helpful thing to be said about making your writing clearer, it’s this: If you see a phrase you’ve heard a million times before (such as this one), replace it.
This is also the advice of novelist and 63-year-old enfant terrible (see ‘Foreign words’ story below), Martin Amis.
Here’s how he advised an author to remedy the clichés of ‘flea-ridden’ and ‘mangy’ dogs: ‘they look like abruptly promoted rats, bemused by their sudden elevation, and pining for a quiet return to the rodent kingdom’.
While we can’t all be redrafting our emails on the strength of sudden literary inspiration, our readers would probably appreciate correspondence that doesn’t sound like it's part of a recycling program.
As ever, the best strategy is to let the writing simmer for a day or so before you give it a review by boiling strongly and skimming the clichés off the top. Often you won’t even notice them until you take a second look at what you’ve written. It might be OK to dash off a quick, cliché-ridden response email, but if your writing has to persuade or compel, take the time to review and make every phrase as original as you can.
