Kill the cliché

You can’t write for toffee? Your sub-editor’s out to lunch and your newspaper style guide’s as old as the hills? A new website called Kill the cliché aims to name, shame and hang, draw and quarter overuse of clichés in newspapers. Currently the world news sections of six major American newspapers get the search engine grilling,

The engine behind it indexes only 6 major newspapers, and we may add more in the future. I should also say that we decided to go after the international/world news sections of these newspapers, as they are usually the most badly cliched (and, unfortunately, the ones carrying the most impact). link

Khartoum-based Meskel Square is overjoyed to find a number of his fave clichés in the site’s top ten,

I’m proud to say four out of his top ten chichés of “all time” have appeared in my copy within the past few days. They are “unrest”, “insurgent”, “amid” and “death toll”… Now that I have been found out, I suppose I ought to start making more use of my online thesaurus. Brace yourselves for a run of articles about the contumacious members of Darfur insurrectionist aggregations. link