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Avoiding clichés

Avoiding clichés

Well–worn phrases and expressions have a tendency to creep into people's speech or writing without their realizing it. Here's a list of 20 popular (or unpopular!) clichés, ranked in order of their frequency in the Oxford English Corpus, a database consisting of hundreds of millions of words of contemporary written English.

Try to avoid using clichés in college assignments or job applications. They tend to annoy people and may create an impression of laziness or a lack of careful thought. They can even become a barrier to communication, as people may tune out when they hear a tired, overused phrase and so miss the very point that you're trying to make.

Taking action!

Once you've spotted a cliché in your writing, you need to rephrase your sentence so that it conveys your intended meaning in fresher and more effective language. This section gives suggestions on how to use a thesaurus or a dictionary to help you select alternatives for some of the overused phrases in the table above.

What does it mean?

Think about the basic sense of the cliché you've identified: what does it actually mean? You'll often find that certain key words come to mind, either as synonyms themselves or as 'ingredients' of the expression's meaning. You may be able to use one of these key words as a synonym for the cliché, or else you can look them up in a thesaurus to find other alternatives. If you have difficulty thinking of the basic meaning, look the expression up in a dictionary and use the words in the definition as a starting point for finding suitable synonyms in a thesaurus. You could also ask a friend for their opinion.

Do you need it?

Quite a lot of clichéd expressions are really just 'fillers', words or groups of words without any real meaning. They tend to be used to give emphasis, to maintain the flow of speech, or just to prevent uncomfortable gaps in a conversation. But you should try to eliminate this sort of cliché from your written work: they might increase the length of your essay or assignment, but they won't improve the quality of your writing.

Here are some examples of how you might go about replacing clichés in your work. First you'll see a sentence which uses a cliché (highlighted in red), then some suggestions for how to take action, and finally the original sentence rewritten without the cliché.

While you probably can't avoid clichés completely, remember that overusing them is likely to be a barrier to clear expression and give your reader the impression of laziness or a lack of careful thought.

For more help with identifying and avoiding clichés in your writing, see the Brush up your style section in the centre of the Compact Oxford Thesaurus for Students.