How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem (15 page)

Small cove of spiritual knowledge
isn’t bad, but bringing in the
beacon
ruins the effect. I would go for something simple, just adding a little understatement at the end:

A few lines up, I said it was “barely acceptable” to use dead metaphors. If I don’t seem enthusiastic, that’s because, first, even a cliché which doesn’t smell bad anymore smells worse than something fresh, and, second, in a particular case, some people might feel it’s not dead yet (as Monty Python would put it), that it’s still a cliché. The bottom line is the importance of at least developing an awareness of the sell-by date on words and expressions, weighing them in your mind, and acting judiciously. (In that sentence, I used three metaphors:
bottom line, sell-by date
, and
weighing.
I decided that they were dead, not dying. What do you think?)

I’d like to add another stage Orwell didn’t think of, perhaps because he didn’t live in the Internet era, when everything, including
clichés’ lives, moves much faster than it ever did before. In today’s highly interactive world, there is a period—between the invention of a metaphor and the point at which it is definitively arrived at cliché land—in which it’s not only usable but can be lively and fun.

Consider the expression
[to] throw [someone] under the bus,
meaning to publicly betray an erstwhile ally. The earliest use I have been able to find is a 1994 quote from a
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
article: “Bethel Park council is delaying action on a site plan for an ice arena because of legal action by a citizens group opposing the project. Council president Philip Ehrman said the group is ‘trying to throw the community under the bus.’” It first showed up in the
New York Times
in 2000, but didn’t really take off till a few years later, with seven uses in 2005 and thirteen in 2006—including, crucially, a discussion in William Safire’s “On Language” column in November. Up until that point, I would submit,
throw under the bus
was a still-new toy with which writers could give readers some shared pleasure. This is a risky business, however, because different people will have different notions on where a particular phrase lies at a particular point in time.

There’s one more strategy for making a cliché acceptable: the old switcheroo. In 1937,
Time
magazine observed, “To the people who voted for him last November, Franklin Roosevelt was Mr. Right.” Since roughly that time,
Mr. Right
—meaning a male who is perfect husband material—has been a cliché. One strategy for making it (marginally) acceptable was
Time
’s: that is, using it in a political as opposed to romantic context. There matters stood until 1985, when a television movie called
Romance on the Orient Express
contained this piece of dialogue: “I’m not looking for Mr. Right, I’m looking for Mr. Right Now.” Good show! The screenwriter tweaked the cliché
and made it usable again. By now, of course,
Mr. Right Now
is as clichéd as it gets—and so is a recent (unisex) replacement,
The One.
Yet another variation would be needed to remove the stigma:
Mr. Write
for a dreamy literary guy,
Mr. Left
if the woman demanded a mate with progressive politics,
Mr. Far Right
for folks on the other end of the spectrum,
Mr. Righter
for someone chosen over a current beau,
Mr. Rite Aid
for a hypochondriac,
Mr. Wry
for an ironic sort, and so forth. You get the idea.

Even beyond the fact that the target is moving at warp speed extremely fast, it is impossible to provide a comprehensive list of clichés. First, there are way too many of them. Second, especially on the margins between dead and dying, what’s a cliché to you may not be one to me: it’s an inherently subjective judgment. Third, clichés are field-specific: if you are immersed in the world of sports, or pop music, or business, or higher education, you will be highly sensitized to particular buzzwords and catchphrases that would strike a layperson as unremarkable or unintelligible. And finally, they are register-specific. That is, a cliché in the world of blogs will not be one in the world of scholarly journals, and vice versa.

That being said, here’s a brief list of words and phrases that in my judgment are currently clichés and thus are to be avoided in writing:

5.
EUPHEMISM, BUZZWORDS, AND JARGON

These closely related categories resemble clichés in being (as Tom and Ray of the radio show
Car Talk
like to say) unencumbered by the thought process. Euphemisms are prettifying terms. The classic example is the collection of ever-more-euphemistic words for the place where one goes to
relieve oneself
, which itself is a euphemism for
urinate
or
defecate.
^*
Thus we say
restroom
, which is a euphemism for
men’s room
or
ladies’ room
, which is a euphemism for
bathroom
, which is a euphemism for
toilet
, which is a euphemism for
privy
, which is a euphemism for…well, this notion is apparently so horrible and unpleasant that we don’t have an actual word for it. I guess that if there were a need to refer to it in writing, I would recommend
bathroom
as the most straightforward, even though baths are rarely taken there.

The military is famously a fount of euphemism, with such terms as
armed intervention
(war),
neutralize
(kill),
pacify
(kill),
collateral damage
(unintentionally kill)
, friendly fire
(unintentionally kill fellow soldiers), and
enhanced interrogation
(torture). Euphemisms for pregnancy are legion as well. The most recent term I’m aware of
originated in Great Britain in the 1990s and has been taken up by American celebrity journalists with a vengeance; it is to refer to a pregnant woman as having a
baby bump.

Need I say that, unless you’re being ironic or quoting someone,
enhanced interrogation, baby bump
, and their ilk should not pass through your fingers?

Jargon—instances of which are sometimes known as
buzzwords
—differs from euphemism in a couple of ways. It usually originated with members of a particular occupation or group, and it usually fancifies or obfuscates something that doesn’t have an especially negative connotation. Sometimes, it names a thing or phenomenon for which there was no previous word. Sometimes, it means pretty much nothing at all. Jargon is a more egregious problem than euphemism, in my experience; it is strangely enticing and can spread like a virus.

Politics is home to a particular kind of jargon: words and phrases intended to spin a particular issue in a particular direction. People on different sides of the political spectrum express the same concepts in completely different vocabularies! Thus
progressives
are
pro-choice
and in favor of
investment
and increasing
revenue. Patriotic Americans,
for their part, rail against
abortion on demand, tax-and-spend policies
, the
death tax,
and
the Democrat Party.
(The last is a clever one, in subtly dissociating the party with small-
d democratic
.) If you’re on one side or the other and trying to stoke the fire on any of these issues, go nuts with the terms I’ve used and the many others like them. However, if your aim is to write in an intelligent, nonpartisan way, avoid them at all costs. Instead, seek words that accurately and temperately convey meaning, such as
legalized
abortion, government spending, taxes
(in general), and
the estate tax
(in particular).

Prose that comes from business—both advertising and public relations, on the one hand, and internal communication, on the other—contains more jargon than nonjargon. The particular terms in vogue change from time to time. Currently, they include
reach out to
(contact or get in touch with),
going forward
(in the future),
monetize
(make money from),
best practices
(doing something in a good or efficient way),
sustainable
(doing something so as not to degrade
the environment,
which itself is a buzzword that made its way into general diction),
grow
(transitive verb meaning “develop” or “increase the size of”),
give back
(make a charitable contribution or conduct a charitable enterprise),
bandwidth
(personal or organizational capacity), and
rightsize
(save money by firing people—which takes us back to euphemism).

Between writing that paragraph and this one, I had lunch and read the
New York Times
, which reported that a radio corporation called Clear Channel Communications had fired several dozen disk jockeys employed by the radio stations it owns around the country. The
Times
quoted “a company spokeswoman” as saying: “We’ve completely rethought our regional market strategy and reinvented our operations in those markets in a way that will let us compete on a new level—and succeed using all of Clear Channel’s resources, scale and talent.”

That is euphemistic jargon on a very high level indeed. If you work and write for a business, or if you aspire to, you might want to study it, for a mastery of this discourse seems to be essential if you want to rise to the top. I certainly hope the student who wrote the
following sentence for one of my journalism classes was interested in a career in public relations or corporate communications, rather than as an actual writer, trying to tell something true to actual readers:

Actually, that’s probably a bit much even in a business setting. In any case, what he meant to say was:

Generally speaking, this kind of nonsense isn’t that hard to avoid. But somewhat more insidious is a collection of terms that originated, I believe, in psychology and other
helping professions
(itself a prime bit of jargon). The two worst offenders are the verb
share
(often used as a synonym for
say,
as in
He shared that he was coming home
) and the noun
issues
used to mean
problems
or
disagreements
or some other negative feelings, as in
She has issues with her mother.
My closing piece of advice in this section—and words to live by in general—is to write, when the facts support it:

C. Sentences

1.
WORD REP.

The above phrase (the second part of which is an abbreviation for
repetition
) is the comment I write most frequently on student papers. That’s because, I think, word repetition is a telltale—maybe
the
telltale—sign of awkward, nonmindful writing. The writer has presumably gotten the pertinent information onto the screen or page, but has not taken the time to read the sentence to herself, silently or out loud. If she did, that word rep. would sound like a fingernail on the blackboard. Consequently, “listening” to your sentences with the sensitivity and skill to pick up word repetition is a strong first step toward mindful writing.

There are some nuances to my unified theory of word repetition, which boil down to: the more common the word, the more leeway you have in repeating it, and vice versa. In the previous sentence, I repeated
to, word, more,
and
the
(twice!). That is not ideal, but it’s okay; readers are not likely to notice. On the other hand, I know I have to wait at least a few more pages before reusing
nuances, leeway
, or the expressions
vice versa
and
boils down to.
Words like
repetition
and
common
would be somewhere in between. I would not be able to use the notion of
unified theory
again in the entire article or book.

The word-repetition problem can be hard to solve. Usually, a writer uses a word twice because no alternative is self-evident or, sometimes, conceivable after what seems like a lengthy period of cogitation. A particular pitfall is the infelicity that H. M. Fowler dubbed
elegant variation.
He was referring to a synonym, near synonym,
or invented synonym used for the express and blatant purpose of avoiding word repetition.