Keeping Those Clichés To A Minimum

It’s always best when you’re writing a blog to make sure that you use proper grammar and style, but every once in while you want to be able to bend those rules to add a little conversational tone or flavor.

If you only write in a formalized tone with perfect grammar all the time all your blogs and other writings will wind up sounding a little on the stodgy side.  However when it comes to things like clichés a few ground rules are necessary so that you’ll know how to use them well.

First of all you shouldn’t worry about using the occasional cliché, but when you put too many of them together your blog starts to sound weak.  Remember that with each additional cliché you use in any passage that you’re writing, you’re taking away from the story’s forcefulness and impact. Here are some examples of the kind of clichés that you can use sparingly but are at the same time ones that can cripple your writing.

• throwing out the rulebook
• bitter disappointment
• bone of contention
• dead as a door nail

Of course there are many others but you get the idea that using one of these in a blog might not be too bad but sprinkling them through a passage can weaken your impact as a writer.

Remember that you can use a cliché and it’s acceptable when it serves to highlight your meaning in a precise way. However, you should never use one just as dressing to make a sentence sparkle.

What it all comes back to is being precise in the language that you use.  As much is possible that often means you’ll need to revise what you are writing, sometimes several different times.  As well, wherever possible it’s a good idea if you can leave something you’ve written alone for an hour or a day to let it ferment and then come back to it to see what changes need to be made.

Here’s some more examples of the kind of things that you shouldn’t do with clichés.  One of the biggest no-no’s is using a cliché to inflate a simple idea.  For example, By the end of the year, the long arm of the law had caught up with him should read, The law caught up with him.

Remember too that it’s next to impossible to do anything with the cliché to make it sound better. If you really feel the need to use one, use it the way that most people hear it and don’t try something like this, They put the fancy cart before the old horse.

When you try to write a good blog sometimes clichés can be the way to go but you want to use them sparingly.  Remember that the idea quite often is to get a good conversational tone and affiliation with your readers, so where clichés might be a bad idea for formal writing they can work well when used to a minimum in blogs.

Written by Rob Starr from Rob Starr
Posted on December 27th, 2009 and filed under Blogging
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