Cut the clichés in your writing

Pity the bedraggled cliché?

No way.

If that seems harsh, think of how clichés harm writing, draw unwelcome attention, replace freshness with staleness and rob readers of the pleasure of original expressions that make writing memorable.

Here are a few clichés that appear so often in modern communication that they have become parodies of themselves:

It is what it is. This is not my first rodeo. That's above my pay grade.

Watch almost any TV series and this kind of expression comes at you at every turn. TV writers face unforgiving time restraints, so they use clichés to economize.

But a reader seeing clichés on a page can recognize, at a glance, tired and lazy hack work.

Clichés do connect with what's called "lived experience."

But discerning readers crave and appreciate the uplift of originality.

Consider this grotesque cliché, used by baseball writers and broadcasters who tell us a batter's base hit "plated" two runs. That means two baserunners safely crossed home plate. And instead of saying a batter hit a home run, they will tell us a batter "went yard," meaning he hit the ball out of the park.

Compare that drivel with the elegance of the writer John Updike's description of the day the Hall of Famer Ted Williams played his last game with the Boston Red Sox:

"Of all team sports, baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely populated with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner."

Of course, writers who do not embrace models like Updike might take the lazy way out and say of Williams: He was what he was.