From cliché to touché
Over on Poynter Online, Roy Peter Clark discusses how you can take a cliché—one of the main bugaboos of good writing—and give it a bit of a twist to make your readers say “touché!”
Phrases become cliché because frequently they express a bit of truth well and wittily, and they can be applied to so many situations. Thus, old aphorisms like “Curiosity killed the cat,” or current catch phrases like “well, Duh!” are repeated over and over. It becomes like hearing the same joke over and over again: It doesn’t hurt to revisit an old chestnut once in a while, but it’s no longer funny when you encounter it for the fifth time in a single day.
But that doesn’t mean you have to delete all traces of clichés from everything you write. Just use them judiciously and thoughtfully, rather than reflexively. Check out Clark’s advice here.
Roy Jacobsen
in Elsewhere on the Web, Growing as a writer
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