Avoid cliche’s like the plague

by | Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Just came across this great comment in an article titled Let us now praise the cliche

This Article “Let us now praise…the cliche” made me mad as a wet hen. The Article-Writer thinks cliches are the best thing since sliced bread. Well, I hate to take the wind out of his sails, but I’ve got a bone to pick with him. When it comes to cliches, he’s out to lunch and needs an immediate wake-up call so he can (what else?) wake up and smell the coffee. Sure, once in a blue moon, cliches may serve to spread the word to the great unwashed. However, as a rule of thumb, cliches should usually be avoided like the plague because, after all is said and done, a lazy resort to cliches sounds the death-knell for good writing. So, would I ever take the path of least resistance and fall back on cliches? No way, Jose! Never, not even if, word-choice-wise, I was between a rock and a hard place. And, you can take that to the bank.

Topics related to this post: Creativity | Fun | Good | Bad Design

A few randomly selected blog posts…

ChatGPT is a smart, drunk intern: 3 examples

ChatGPT is a smart, drunk intern: 3 examples

Harry Frankfurt the philosopher passed away, this past Sunday. He was 94. As the NYTimes obituary said, he was... ... a philosopher whose fresh ideas about the human will were overshadowed in the broader culture by his analysis of a kind of dishonesty that he found...

About face

I love finding interesting faces. I am not speaking of the ones on people (though I like interesting ones there as well) but rather the unexpected faces we find in things around us. I have been doing this for a while now and have a flickr set devoted to this. Here are...

Of math and ambigrams: Exploring Symmetry

Ambigram for Symmetry displaying rotational symmetry I have been writing a series of articles for At Right Angles (a mathematics education magazine) with my friend Gaurav Bhatnagar on the art and mathematics of ambigrams. The first article in the series (Of Art and...

Creative teachers study cited by neaToday

Danah Henriksen and I recently published a paper in TCRecord titled:We teach who we are: Creativity in the lives and practices of accomplished teachers. More details of the paper and link to download it can be found on this page: Creativity & Teaching, new article...

Palindromic Poetry

A few years ago I got bitten by the bug of Palindromic Poetry - poems that double back on themselves, that can be read this way, or that. This is consistent with my love for ambigrams and other kinds of symmetrical wordplay. Take a look...

TPCK book covers

I finally received a copy of the Handbook of TPCK for educators (which I had blogged about previously here). It looks great! Matt and I have a key chapter (Introducing TPCK). I hadn't read this in a while, and after I got the book, I skimmed it... and it reads well....

Another New Year’s card

We just created another New Year's Card / Video. Check it out: Shreya's Magic Touch [youtube width="425" height="355"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOrRsXaFE3o[/youtube]

Neuroscience, downtime and creativity: New article

Neuroscience, downtime and creativity: New article

In this article, in our ongoing series on Rethinking technology & creativity in the 21st century, we interview Dr. Jung. Dr. Jung is a neuro-psychologist, brain imaging researcher, and a clinical professor of neurosurgery at the University of New...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *