What I learned: John Hilton on avoiding cliches

YDR staffers who won Keystone Awards learned about everything from blending in to dealing with roadblocks to having difficult conversations with sources. Religion reporter John Hilton's story about the result of a fire at a local church was part of a Thanksgiving-day series on people who were thankful even though they'd lost something or experienced a difficult time. It won first place in special projects in the Keystone Awards.

This story came about soon after an exercise on trite writing in which the entire newsroom participated. We were shown a photo and asked to write 150-200 words in the most trite phrases we could produce. Competitive as I am, I was determined to win the gift card at stake. And I can admit now that I cheated a bit, searching the web for trite words and phrases to boost my entry.

I didn't win the gift card, but I gained a new insight into predictable writing. To this day, I am thinking about that exercise with every story I write. I force myself to try new words and phrases and to avoid the tritest of the trite. Sometimes the results are rejected by an editor, but it's still a good learning exercise.

I love John's effort to avoid cliches even if it means trying a word or phrase that doesn't work. Why settle for writing the same old stuff everyone else is writing?

Phrases to run away from

Check this out: A blog that says its mission is "to showcase linguistic crutches journalists employ."

 It breaks 'em down, folks, with links and everything. Like "rolling in his/her grave" and "as a matter of fact." 

Good stuff.

Cliche-writing results are in, and the winner is ...

Will Hanlon.


Congrats, Will. Your $25 Rutter's gift card will be in your hands shortly.


I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on what you learned by doing this contest. I think we often use cliches because they come to us automatically (they're cliches, of course they do) and we don't push ourselves to come up with something better. Everyone who did this contest pushed themselves to come up with the most cliches they could -- and if you take that energy and put it toward replacing cliches with fresh phrasing, you're a better writer.


The judge was Skip Wood, formerly a reporter at USAToday for more than a decade who covered the NFL and other major sports. Skip and I have been friends since the day I walked in to the Harrisonburg (Va.) Daily News-Record's newsroom and he welcomed me to the sports staff there. He later worked for several years at the Richmond Times-Dispatch before going to USAToday. He now works at wjla.com/tbd.com in Washington, D.C., doing stories and a morning e-mail alert designed to set up the day for Washingtonians. He's on Twitter.


 We've spent the past couple of decades talking about anything and everything journalism, including amazingly good writing and insufferably bad writing. And he's one of the most entertaining writers I've known. So he has a keen eye for this kind of stuff.


I asked him to judge this based on who did the best job trying to write poorly, since that was the point. So if he's complimenting you on writing cliche-filled tripe, well, take it as the compliment it's meant to be. (One note on judging in case you were wondering: Some of you had headlines, some of you didn't; I asked him not to add or subtract for hed/no hed.)


Click 'Cliche writing contest' on the left rail to read everyone's entries. 


Here are Skip's comments:

These people are good. I mean bad. 
Here’s my take from each one, in alphabetical order:
--Buffy Andrews: Loved the fake name, first of all. ‘Buffy.’* Too funny. The clichés slayed. One after another after another after another after another.
--Joan Concilio: Just really, really bad. Loved “that aforementioned rain.”
--Will Hanlon: Smart. Just smart.  Not only that, but FAIRFAX COUNTY --
--John Hilton: Second graph nails it. Shot? What shot?
--Tom Joyce: I mean, you gotta love, “Bertha Muckenbaugh.”
--Bill Landauer: This was Gene Weingarten funny.
--Andrea Lazarus: The more you read it, the more you get it.
--Susan Martin: This is one of those stories you see sometimes when, oh, I don’t know. . . you’re reading a middle-school newspaper.
--Erin McCracken: “. . .strapped on his fishing gear.”
--Stephanie Reighart: Please. Just read the last sentence from the second graph.
Winner? Hanlon.
I liked it because it was written in the manner of a wordsmith who really thinks he’s a wordsmith when, actually, he doesn’t know anything about being a wordsmith. 

*This was Skip being his humorous self. I asked him about it and he said, "I was 99.99 percent sure 'Buffy' was, in fact, her real name."

YDR writing challenge: Write trite (for a reason); win a gift card

Buffy's post on her blog about getting rid of trite expressions in your writing got me thinking: What if we challenged YDR staffers to see who could write the most cliche-filled passage, with the winner being the "worst" of the bunch?

So, yeah, we're doing it. A friend of mine, a creative writer and career journalist whom none of you know, will judge it. (Thus I won't be entering). 

Your assignment: Write the first three paragraphs (150-word limit) of a main day-after-flooding news story, using the photo below as your inspiration/reference. Although this is a real picture, your entries do not need to be completely nonfiction. However, do write something that could be printed in the next day's paper as the main news story; in other words, don't write opinion or something silly, and be courteous to the gentleman in the photo.

 For example, if I was allowed to enter, you know how I love ad-campaign-based newswriting, so my entry might be something like, "Waders: $75. Waste-deep water: Free, from Mother Nature. Beer and dog food to ride out the flood: Priceless." And so on.

How to enter: E-mail me your submissions. One entry per person, please.

Deadline: 5 p.m. Friday, Sept. 23

Open to: Anyone in the YDR newsroom. (If any YDR alums or anyone else reading this want to participate, leave your passages in the comments, but only YDR staffers are eligible to win the gift card).

Prize: $25 Rutter's gift card.

Why are we doing this? Because by intentionally writing cliche-filled passages, we can become better self-editors by recognizing when those cliches are creeping in to our own stories ... and we can rub them out and replace them with fresh phrasing.

For your reading (and perhaps research) pleasure, here is more from this blog on cliches. 

Vote on this cliche-with-a-twist

If you put a new twist on a cliche, is it still a cliche, or a fresh piece of writing? Here are the first two grafs from a story in today's New York Times:

"They were deaf, but they were not silent. For decades, a group of men who were sexually abused as children by the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin reported to every type of official they could think of that he was a danger, according to the victims and church documents.

"They told other priests. They told three archbishops of Milwaukee. They told two police departments and the district attorney. They used sign language, written affidavits and graphic gestures to show what exactly Father Murphy had done to them. But their reports fell on the deaf ears of hearing people."

Like it? Don't like it? Why/why not?

It is what it is: A columnist takes on idiots

For the 26th year, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Gene Collier awards the Trite Trophy for abuse of the English language, by sports writers, broadcasters, athletes and fans. His short list isn't very short, with many phrases in the discussion, but at the end of the day take a moment to read this absolute monster piece of writing.

As a writer, Collier clearly has a heck of a motor.

Good warnings

I like this post from John McIntyre, former chief of the Baltimore Sun's copy desk, for a couple of reasons:

One, it's good for a couple of chuckles.

And two, it's always good to be reminded of the writing minefields that sometimes are only a step or two away. Knowing what territory to avoid can sometimes be just as helpful as knowing where you want to go.

Worth a look

Most of you know I don't have many absolutes about writing, but that one of them is never, ever use an advertising campaign slogan in a story (much less in a lead). Since I consider the use of any ad slogan to be a cliche, I liked this site dedicated to tracking (and, it hopes, killing) cliches.

I was, however, puzzled by the inclusion of words like "amid" and "allegedly" as cliches. Maybe they're overused, but not (to me) in the same league as "at the end of the day" or "on the campaign trail," which are also on their list.

Anyway, it's an interesting site to look at. What do you think?