Cliches (2)
(adapted from Chapter 2 of The Play of Words by Richard Lederer)
Here are some further experiments with cliches, in order to emphasize how easily
one might come to use them without recognizing what they actually are:
| afraid of her/his own_____________ | a chip off _____________
| grin and_____________
|
| make both ends_____________ | when all is said and_____________ |
a square peg _____________
|
| take it or _____________ | odds and_____________ |
in the twinkling _____________ |
Sometimes phrases are so frequently and customarily used that one may never be
aware that they are cliches:
all of a sudden
before I knew it
you could hear a pin drop
I had sweated so much that I felt like a wet rag
there was no rhyme or reason
The intention in avoiding cliches is to ensure that one's writing is
original. If someone else could have written the same sentence you
would,then wy not let her/him do it? Part of keeping one's writing
interesting, intelligent, and clear is to let it speak for
you, in your voice, and not someone else's. Writing or speaking in
cliches presents to a reader an idea of you-the-writer as someone whose thoughts
and statements are unoriginal, trite, and boring; keeping this in
mind, can you imagine who would want to read such an essay? Even if an essay's topic
is quite important, and could inspire great beneficial changes for
societies across the world, if the language in which the essay is expressed is
simplistic, error-filled, or cliche-ridden, then a reader will most certainly put
the essay aside, unread.
Something else to consider -- and which will be attended in a later hand-out -- is
whether one's ideas presented in an essay are cliched; it is not always a
word or phrase which is common, or universally bland, but sometimes an entire
idea or attitude.
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