Section 1
A cliché is a claim that stopped carrying information
Every dead phrase was once alive. Trusted partner meant something when few suppliers behaved that way. World-class meant something when the comparison set was local. The phrases died because everyone adopted them, and a claim that every competitor also makes cannot distinguish between them. That gives you a mechanical test rather than a stylistic one. Take any sentence on your homepage and ask whether your three closest competitors could publish it unchanged. If they could, it is doing no work, regardless of how well it reads. Most companies fail this test on their entire opening paragraph. That is not a writing failure. It is a positioning failure that writing has been asked to hide. The broader catalogue of these errors is in [Common Storytelling Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make](/blog/common-storytelling-mistakes-entrepreneurs-make).
Section 2
The substitution test
When you find a cliché, do not reach for a synonym. Ask what fact made you want to say it in the first place. Fast turnaround becomes proposals returned within two working days. Deep expertise becomes eleven years working exclusively with regional insurers. Tailored solution becomes we rebuilt the intake form for your claims team because the standard one broke on your product codes. Each replacement is longer and each is checkable, which is the whole point. Occasionally the honest answer is that no fact underlies the phrase. That is a useful discovery. It means you found a claim you cannot support, and the correct move is deletion rather than rewriting. Building the raw material for these substitutions is covered in [Creating a Library of Stories for Your Business](/blog/creating-a-library-of-stories-for-your-business).
Section 3
A phrase audit
Clichés cluster by function, which makes them easy to hunt. The table below groups the common offenders by the job they were hired to do, capability, quality, relationship, innovation, and lists the specific evidence each one should be traded for.
Section 4
Run the swap on your top five pages
Start with the pages that carry traffic and revenue. Copy the text into a document and highlight every phrase that survives the competitor test, which is to say every phrase that only you could write. In most cases very little will be highlighted. Delete the rest rather than rewriting it, and read what remains. If the page still makes sense, the deleted material was filler. If it no longer makes sense, you now know exactly which claims need real evidence behind them, and that is a research task, not a copy task. Then go and get the evidence. Ask delivery for the actual turnaround times. Ask two clients what they would say about working with you and write down their words rather than paraphrasing. The best replacement text is usually a quotation you did not write. Domain-specific writing challenges are discussed in [Computer Vision Applications for Business Leaders](/blog/computer-vision-applications-for-business-leaders).
Section 5
When plain language becomes its own cliché
The correction has its own failure mode. Anti-cliché writing turns into a house style of short declarative sentences, contrarian openers and studied bluntness, which is just as recognisable and just as empty once everyone adopts it. Specificity is the actual goal, not plainness. A long technical sentence packed with facts beats a short punchy one that says nothing. Watch also for false precision. Inventing a number to replace a vague adjective is a worse offence than the adjective was, because it is a claim rather than a noise. And accept that some category vocabulary is load-bearing. If your buyers search for a term, use the term, define it in plain English on first use, and move on. Avoiding a word your market uses is not clarity, it is inconvenience dressed as principle.