Are you a victim of cliches? Get out of the habit and start writing better today!

I had a professor who said, "Clichés are lazy writing." Clichés are phrases that have been used so extensively that they have lost all meaning. At first, this definition might seem confusing. All words have a meaning assigned to them; how is it that some groups of words are so over wrought that they don't mean anything?

I was recently reading a book called "Better Off: Flipping the switch on technology" by Eric Brende (Harper Collins Publishers, 2004). In this book, Brende and his wife spend one full year without electricity or motorized devices. Overall, I was delighted with this book. Brende has an amazing sensitivity for word choice and imagery that most other non-fiction writers lack. Unfortunately, I have never read a book that had more clichés.

One sentence reads: "In the doorway stood a young man of burly bearing, smiling widely." Now, I need to revisit my definition of a cliché: a phrase that is overused to the point that it loses all functional meaning. A cliché is also a complete lack of originality. As my professor had said, clichés are lazy writing because they are recycled jargon from other writers. At some point in history, a writer wrote that some villain was "smiling widely," and he thought he was very clever to have likened a smile to a word such as widely. Indeed, this first writer was very clever. Every subsequent writer, unfortunately, is not.

How could this sentence have been improved to give the reader something more to think about, more clues into this character's personality? Is he showing all of his teeth as he smiles? Is it a friendly smile or a mischievous smile? The sentence before this one says, "One day there came a knock at the door―a heavier and slower knock than I was used to hearing." The author seems to be setting up a suspicious meeting. However, as we read on, we learn that the person at the door is actually quite amiable and has stopped by to try to sell a pig to the homeowner. Should the writer be concerned that he deceived we readers by giving us a suspiciously and grimly connotated sentence and followed it with a meaningless phrase like "smiling widely"? Apparently, the writer was not concerned because this was only the first of five clichés found on this page alone.

A paragraph later, the author says, "He didn't think but a minute. Suddenly, I was being whisked away on his wagon." A sentence later, the author and his companion "rounded a bend." There are three clichés here. "He didn't think but a minute" is reminiscent of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" when the Grinch gets caught in a chimney, "once or twice for a minute or two." In both cases, a minute pause is meant to be a quick measurement. A problem arises because, in normal activities and conversation, a minute is actually long time. In a phone conversation, 15 seconds is significant enough of a pause that parties on both ends of the line would decide to end the conversation. A pause that long signals that the conversation is waning.

"Being whisked away" is another cliché. Whisking evokes the vision beating eggs—hurried wrist motions pushing eggs into a mixed-up frenzy. In other contexts, being whisked away is likened to being pulled on a fantastical journey, like Peter Pan pulling the Darling children through the sky towards Never Land. But here, the writer is talking about riding in a horse drawn wagon. How can a horse drawn wagon whisk anyone anywhere? I won't even waste the time to thoroughly discuss the "rounded a bend" comment. (Obviously, all bends are round, and this particular bend was round even before the horse pulled a wagon and its contents through the turn.)

The last cliché, "They lived some distance away", is a ridiculous waste of words. Every distance is always some sort of distance. It matters, however, whether that distance is long or short. Literature has conditioned us to read this particular set of words and register that "some distance" is in fact a very lengthy one. However, one inch is "some distance" just as one billion inches is "some distance."

Although these clichés do not completely ruin the author's writing, they do not add anything to it either. In newspaper and magazine non-fiction, space is limited. Writers cannot waste precious word count on phrases that (1) do not mean anything or (2) lead the reader in the wrong direction. Readers need to be wowed and impressed otherwise they will not finish an article. You cannot captivate a reader by giving him verbose copy infested with ambiguous phrases they have read 9 million times before. If anything they'll be in the middle of your piece, wondering what interesting tidbits they might be missing by not reading the neighboring article.

About the author:
When Janet Krenn applied to graduate school for journalism her friends and family were shocked. Less than two months beforehand, she was completing her undergraduate thesis in a window-less environmental science lab at the University of Illinois. (It was her third independant scientific study as an undergraduate.) After countless hours in laboratories in Illinois and Maryland, she decided that she would rather translate science to the public. Today, Janet lives in Chicago and works as a textbook editor for Houghton Mifflin. She also does freelance writing in science, technology, and travel.