When pressured to finish a piece of writing, writers tend to rely on their fall-back phrases – familiar verbal patterns that they’ve used many times over. Because of their close acquaintance with those words, they’re just easier to use when expressing ideas, especially compared to having to come up with an entirely new construction.

This works out well for most experienced writers. Since they’ve been exposed to loads of writing (both their own and others), they usually have favorite phrases on stock that can serve their needs. For inexperienced ones, however, this usually means either dipping into the wording of their source materials (poor paraphrasing) or using worn-out cliches.

There are also situations where you didn’t really want to do it or you just didn’t notice that you actually do it. That can be a careless act and may affect everything including how you intend your writing would appear to be.

However, even if there comes a time where you don’t have any ideas and words left to write, don’t just end your work just because of that. You can even pause for a while and think for a possible continuation in your writing than just keep on depending about your fall-back phrases and sentences in writing.

If you keep on relying with this kind of phrases and you are also use to it, then don’t expect that you have given all your best to make your writing effective.

You’re just using unnecessary words or phrases in your writing which will only add pointless ideas in your content. Who wants it anyway? No one. So what are you going to do in order to avoid this kind of bad writing?

Simple, there are ways to refrain yourself in doing it so. All you need to do is to realize what’s keeping you in writing fall back phrases.

Poor paraphrasing. Very common in student work, as well as on amateur websites, the writer practically copies from the source, doing nothing more than changing a punctuation here, rearranging words or using synonymous phrases.

You can get away with it, but it won’t make your writing good, nor will it help improve your skills. Instead, you have to revise your previous ideas and see if there are things that you can add up later on.

Cliches. Phrases such as “putting the cart before the horse” and “a little whatever can go a long way” are perfectly valid English phrases that your English correction software will heartily approve. At one point in time, in fact, they might even have been considered clever. After years of use by countless writers, though, they’ve lost every bit of their appeal. Use them and your work just comes across as trite.

How do you build up a good stock of fall-back phrases? There are many ways to do this, although my personal advice is to read more good writing. Look for writers you admire and consume their work. You’ll naturally notice how they structure their phrases and end up adopting some of them into your own writing, helping build up your stick.

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Category: Writing
Keywords: fall back phrases, paraphrasing, cliches