Why Communicating with Cliches Can Be a Bad idea

It was a dark and stormy night. Leaving no stone unturned, two bloggers, three sheets to the wind, put their heads together to think outside the box.

They knew this was no time to reinvent the wheel, so they hit the ground running with their state-of-the-art, once-in-a-lifetime competitive edge. This hands-on, breakthrough technology allowed them to circle back and implement success strategies with incredible vision. In no time at all they grew the business by partnering with professionals who pushed the envelope, treating them like family while going the extra mile.

It was win-win all around.

There is a time and a place for cliches-long ago and far away.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "cliche" as:

• A trite phrase or expression; also : the idea expressed by it;
• A hackneyed theme, characterization, or situation;
• Something (as a menu item) that has become overly familiar or commonplace;

People use cliches because they work . . . sort of. Cliches are communication shortcuts.  People get your point. Everyone's on the same page. Once upon a time phrases like "this is the first day of the rest of your life" and "value added" were brilliant and evocative, or at least really catchy. That was because they were new.

But now that we've all heard them seven zillion times (yawn), we don't hear them at all, and that's bad for your message.

If you want to capture people's attention you need to engage your audience's imagination, make them care, evoke an emotion. You want your readers to taste, or feel, or smell, or see, or laugh about, be annoyed by, or care about what you are saying

But above all, you want to be memorable.

Good writers avoid cliches. Your writing must be fresh and creative. Easy for us to say, right? You're sitting at your laptop with two colleagues drinking old coffee and trying to come up with a tagline before the end of day-tell us, Kathi and Sam, have you bottled originality and freshness? Can we buy some?

We haven't, and we know it's not easy. There's no formula for originality and creativity, but we do know this-using cliches is a formula for stale, derivative copy.

How do you determine if your writing is working? Read it out loud, and test it on an objective person. Is it convincing? Do you care? Will anyone else care? If it isn't working, you may need to start over. Take a moment to make some fresh coffee, for Pete's sake.

You probably can't entirely avoid cliche, but if you avoid every single phrase in the first paragraph of this blog, you'll be well on your way.