My friend Dan sent me this story about an exec at the Tribune Company who has banned 119 cliched words and phrases from the newsroom.
I also read a fun take on the story on an NPR blog.
My first reaction was, "Banning words is bad." But then I thought of all the words and phrases I would like to ban from my students' writing. The first few that come to mind?
"It is true that..."
"In my opinion..."
"In olden times..."
"Nowadays"
"Many people would tell you..."
"At the end of the day..."
"In this paper I am going to..."
"It can be said that..."
And there's so many more.
You see, it's not a set of useful words that the Trib exec is banning, it is the lazy filler words we've heard so often that we now unthinkingly incorporate them into our speech and writing.
I'm all for listing such phrases, and while I won't ban anything outright, I'll certainly think twice before using these words. And more often than not, thinking twice is a good thing.
I'll keep trying to add to the list this week, but I'd love suggestions from other teachers and any old students of mine. Leave them in the comments.
6 comments:
"friend" is not a verb. befriend.
"a whole nother" - this phrase makes no sense. nother is not a word.
"till" used for "until". Sadly I find this used in many of our professional documents...
"gonna"
also, is "funnily enough" grammatically correct? It hurts my ears.
"The bottom line", said about 10 times a day around the office, and seen in emails over and over.
I'm the only person in the company I work for that would rather email a customer then call them. I find it important to keep business communication short and concise, while avoiding language that is overly simplified. I have to consider my audience's time for reading emails each day, and get to the point in the first sentence. Could email usage be impacting a cultures long form writing skills?
I frequently hear the English professor in the next office use this technique. "Here is my red pen. I want you to go through this paper, word by word, and cross out every unnecessary word and phrase." I love her for it. Once the paper is clean, she has them reinsert proper transitions.
In my business writing, I have to force myself to focus on each word and its meaning because cliches sneak into my writing at every opportunity. (Note: I had to stop myself from writing a dozen different cliches in this quick post. It is a very hard habit to break -- or did I mean old habits die hard? Or old dog new tricks? Or, or, or.
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