GrammarPhile Blog

The new year is an absolutely perfect time to make new beginnings in many areas, including your writing. In the same way you might clear out and unclutter your house or apartment, you can rid your writing of redundancies, tautologies and pleonasms — those repetitive words and phrases that include but are not limited to extra words that say the same thing (e.g., begin anew, free gift), words used with acronyms that are part of the acronym (e.g., PIN number, UPC code) and superlatives used for emphasis (e.g., absolutely perfect). The end result will be a positive improvement in your writing, making it tighter, much more concise and infinitely clearer.

Because January is a big month for exercise resolutions, our posts this month focus on whipping your writing into better shape.

Our last post talked about how to identify the clichés in your writing and why you want to get rid of them. This post tells you how to do that.

The first step to eliminating clichés is understanding what they mean. Given that we use clichés because they’re seemingly widely understood, discerning their meaning should be relatively easy, right? Well, yes … if you understand the meaning. That’s not difficult with some of the examples given in the previous post (e.g., few and far between, think outside the box, path of least resistance). But with idioms that have become clichés, it can be more daunting.

Out with the old, in with the new. Familiar? Yes. Inspiring? Not so much.

That’s how it is with clichés — we love them and use them because they’re easy to remember, don’t require much effort or creativity, and are a widely understood shorthand that captures the essence of a person, situation, event, etc. But they also make for writing that feels tired and unoriginal. And if familiarity breeds contempt, it’s easy to see why editors attack such hackneyed expressions with the fury of a woman scorned.