Since no one has the same experiences as you, your work should express your unique voice and your individual thoughts. Are your points specific and clear, or do some ideas appear vague? If so, you might have used a cliché.Īnother technique is to analyze each sentence to see if what you wrote is likely to have appeared in anyone else’s work.

So how can you tell when you’re using a cliché? One method is to slowly read your work out loud and try to develop mental pictures of your content.

How to Find the Clichés that Have Crept into Your Writing A good writer may create and reject over a dozen images before finding the right one, so don’t worry if it takes you a while. When you switch to editing mode, go back to those clichés and brainstorm for inventive new ideas. Taking the time to think of a better metaphor can interrupt writing flow. That said, writers often use clichés in their first drafts and that’s fine. Time and again (cliché), we resort to a cliché instead of stretching to find our own unique voice. These are a few of the tried and true (there’s another one) clichés that wiggle into our work, but add nothing to our conversations.

the grass is always greener on the other side.

How many times have you relied on any of the following phrases, whether in conversations or in your writing: Sometimes clichés are so inherent in our vernacular though that they appear in our content without thought.

A new analogy or metaphor will make much more of an impression on your readers than a dusty old cliché. George Orwell in his Rules of Writing said:īe creative and come up with something fresh. Clichés are what you write when you don’t have the energy or inspiration to think of a new way to express an idea. What was once a fresh way of looking at something has become a weak prop for writing that feels unimaginative and dull.

Try ProWritingAid's Editor For YourselfĪ cliché is a tired, stale phrase or idiom that, because of overuse, has lost its impact.

How to Find the Clichés that Have Crept into Your Writing.

Examples of Clichés in Everyday Language.

Don t go into the long grass