Become an Inventor of Fresh Language: Avoid Cliches

By Curt Hazlett
May 30, 2007 10:28 AM

Slowly, inexorably, a disease is spreading through American newsrooms. No, it's not clinical depression, though that might yet happen after a few more rounds of layoffs. I'm referring to the insidious rise of cliches in stories -- phrases or word uses that once were firm and fresh but have grown so limp through overuse that they've lost their meaning.

Now, I've crafted my share of hackneyed phrases in 30 years of journalism: agreements hammered out, victories scored, even good news-bad news scenarios. Luckily for my clips and career, many of those attempts at snappy writing were killed by editors who knew the difference between good and bad journalism.

These days, though, cliches seem to be creeping in everywhere -- including the business sections of otherwise excellent newspapers. You say you want examples? Happy to oblige. Here are excerpts from stories I've read recently about the airline industry, with the juicy bits italicized:

Like long-range weather forecasts, predicting prevailing travel conditions over the coming weeks and months is always speculative. But as we head into the busy summer travel season, dark clouds on the horizon indicate a bumpy ride. That's true for air travelers across the country, but US Airways passengers might just be facing a perfect storm.

Shares of online travel shop Priceline.com Inc. dropped 9 percent on May 9 after the company posted tepid operating results and warned that its airline ticket business faces turbulence.

The New York-based discount carrier [Jet Blue] has grown rapidly in its seven years of flying but hit turbulence in this year's first quarter as back-to-back ice storms pummeled operations at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

And my favorite, a cliche three-fer:

Qantas CEO Geoff Dixon will remain at the controls as chairwoman Margaret Jackson bails out amid the turbulence of a failed takeover bid, the airline announced Friday.

What compels us to do this kind of thing? What made the writers of these stories fall back on such trite imagery, especially the age-old comparison of business troubles with flight turbulence? And why is it a problem?

To Chris Wienandt, business copy desk chief at the Dallas Morning News and president of the American Copy Editing Society (ACES), there are two kinds of cliches -- "the ones that result from lazy writing, and the ones that result from attempts to be clever."

"I think the problem of formulaic writing falls within the scope of this discussion, too," Wienandt says. "Calling restaurant chains 'concepts,' for instance, is falling prey to industry jargon, to the detriment of reader understanding -- in a way, writing for your sources instead of your audience. There are space fillers, such as 'going forward,' 'at the end of the day,' and the amazingly innocuous 'specifically.' Then there's the 'tech-heavy Nasdaq,' or the 'oil-rich OPEC nations.'

"These are all examples of lazy writing," Wienandt says, "not giving sufficient thought to what the reader is going to see in print or online, and not taking the care to put biz-speak into plain language."

Then there is the cleverness problem, which grows with time. Like children, cliches are not born bad. The first writer to use turbulence as a metaphor for an airline's financial problems -- he or she probably did so right after the Wright brothers' first flight in 1903 -- was on to something clever. Clever, too, were the phrases "level playing field," "outside the box" and "ground zero" the first few hundred times they were used.

The trouble lies in repetition. When someone invents a novel construction, it is quickly purloined by other writers. Consider how quickly Malcolm Gladwell's use of the phrase "tipping point" caused it to enter the language of journalists. The same is true for catchy lines from movies -- "Build it and they will come" pops into my mind. Soon these phrases morph from novel to overused, and they begin to blend in with the scenery. They become shorthand for what we are trying to say.

Why do we use cliches so often when we know they don't work? I have some theories.

Cliches tend to pop out of us most easily when we're under pressure. If a story is due in an hour, there is precious little time to ponder fresh ways of saying something, so we fall back on those stock phrases that never seem far from our consciousness. (That's why the newsroom champs of cliched writing have always been sportswriters, who constantly write on deadline.)

These days, of course, pressure is everywhere. With staffs being cut and beats broadened, most business reporters are covering more and writing faster. Time is more of a luxury than ever, and freshness is a victim.

Then there's online. The demands of all-day journalism have reduced the editing support reporters used to get. For better or worse, stories now hit the Internet just minutes after they've been written and with fewer eyes having examined them. No time for niceties, and cliches are willingly accepted.

"If publications don't afford their online readers the same thoroughness of editing that print editions get, they're doing those readers a disservice," says Wienandt. "The argument that you have to dispense with copy editing for the sake of immediacy doesn't hold much water. If it's that critical to get a story online NOW, then a copy editor should comb through it as quickly after it's posted as possible. But I'd say most stories that are posted online could stand a few minutes delay for copy editing."

The cliche epidemic should matter to all journalists, but I think it should be especially important to those covering business. Business news is not always easy to explain. Because the stories can be complex, they need to be explained with clarity, precision and freshness. Cliches provide none of those things. They dampen energy and cause eyes to skitter, and more importantly they offer nothing new -- no "ah ha!" moment of understanding. They are just old words, used in an old way.

Business journalists, especially those who are new to the field, need to try harder to avoid them. They need to train themselves to see what their fingers are typing and reject anything they've seen too many times before. Writing coach Bob Baker, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, lists bunches of worn-out phrases on his website, Newsthinking (http://www.newsthinking.com). Here are just a few:

• To be sure
• Ratcheted up
• Defining moment
• The Holy Grail
• The rest is history
• Welcome to the world of...

Adds Wienandt, "I think we owe it to our readers to be as clear as we can when we give them information. Turgid, formulaic stories don't keep people interested. Jargon and cliches don't add color, and they don't enhance specificity -- they can even muddy things up."

If you want to get your points across with power, find replacements for those overworked phrases. Be the inventor of fresh language, not a perpetuator of stale phrases. It's much more fun.

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism