We are told to avoid cliché. Most of us forget that this is good advice; I’m not going to review recent posts now, but I’m sure I’d find a fair bit of cliché in my own writing. Avoiding cliché will help you think about what you are actually trying to say, and force you to come up with a plain way to say it, and ultimately make you a better writer.
You may say, I don’t care about being a better writer, I’m just communicating! People know what I mean. Yes, well, that is the reason to use a cliché; it is a sort of short-hand for conceptual expression. We use them precisely because we expect people to know what they mean. The problem is that they are so familiar it may weaken what you’re trying to express, or worse, make your writing seem a little boring.
In a few days you may see some writing about how I installed Arch Linux on my laptop, which I was writing just now. Near the start I began to say that I was going to overview the installation process, and I almost wrote something like “here it is in a nutshell.” Then I thought, you know, I wouldn’t mind going the rest of my life without reading about something else being in a nutshell. I figured that at this point, if I see the words “in a nutshell” in a text, there better be an O’Reilly imprint on the spine. Then I began to write something like, “here’s a whirlwind tour…” Whirlwind tour. Hmm. That sounds a trifle overused as well. I finally settled (pending revision) on calling it an “executive summary.” While this is also a common expression, it is not a cliche in the same sense as the last two; an executive summary is a concrete product, with a clearly defined meaning. It has a reason for being, and my overview matched the same criteria. If I were a really great writer, I might have avoided using any expression at all, and just written, “here’s an overview.”
Unfortunately, I’m just not that good. But maybe someday.
