Sure, it's an amusing little time-waster, but it's also valuable to writers as a tool, to recognize cliches. I always teach my classes to avoid cliches like the plague (lol) because cliches show lazy writing. I learned this pretty late in my writing journey, but once I realized how to recognize them -- and why it was important to avoid them -- my writing started becoming more fresh, more original.
Why are cliches so bad? Well, using cliches means we're leaning upon another writer's clever way of describing something. It's not plagiarism (because the phrases are so common). But it is "borrowing," in a sense. Using something we've heard before. Something that wasn't ours, to begin with...
Plus, cliches, by their nature, aren't unique, original, special. And we should always be striving for "unique, original, special" in our writing.
Interesting. Thanks for the link! I'm glad to see that I've never used those! (I didn't click for more yet though)
ReplyDeleteFinally I have found some very useful article about the free cliche finder! Dear author, thank you very much for it, because it is really very important and interesting for me. And as I see from the comments above, I am not the only one who is interested in this topic so much, and that is why, der author, I would like to ask you not to stop writing the articles like this, because they will really help to many of the readers, including me. So I am really waiting for the new articles on this web site from you!
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