Avoiding clich?s like the plague

From Rhetorica Network :

/Writing teachers often advise students to avoid cliches — those
tired old expressions (such as “tired old expressions”) that rob
writing of it vigor. Clich?s are as old as the hills and as boring
as watching paint dry./

Heh.

/To strip away the clich?s would require, to some extent, the
stripping away of master narratives — perhaps the most important of
the structural biases of journalism. And without those, the press
has very little story to tell. Clich?s compact the narrative into
easily-digested bits. And those bits may be strung together into
discoursive patterns that reporters and editors understand as news
dramatically told.

One might even argue that avoiding clich?s is tantamount to avoiding
“objectivity.” Journalism relates and creates socio-political
realities as, perhaps, the most important discoursive practice in
the noetic field. What do we get as news when reporters move beyond
the standard ways of knowing that they mirror and create?/

I don’t know. Good writers have trained themselves to avoid clich?s like
the plague. Talking the stigma away from using them would be sort of
like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Notice how these clich?s convey /exactly/ what I meant to say? Yes,
clich?s denote a certain unoriginality. But what they lack in
creativity, they make up for in clarity and brevity. Are we writing to
impress ourselves and our peers, or are we writing to benefit the readers?

Once again, Dr. Cline stimulates thinking about the business.

Will copy desks start letting them slip back into their newspapers?
Don’t hold your breath.