Remember how people keep telling you to be careful with your descriptions and modifiers?  One of the reasons is the fact that a lot of them have been so overused that they’ve literally lost much of their effect.

Take a travel article, for instance, that describes an island in the Philippines as the country’s “best-kept secret.”  That phrase has been used to describe so many places and so many things over the years that any weight it used to carry has been effectively diminished.  Chances are, some travel writer has also called a different island in the Philippines in a different article as its “best-kept secret.”

Same goes when a film critic calls a movie a “must see” or “can’t miss.”  Both are appropriate descriptions for a good film, but a review using them tends to sound particularly trite and lazy.  Surely, you can come up with more creative ways to extol a film’s virtues.

The point is, you have to recognize when you’re using similar cliches in your writing.   After all, good writing is really more than impeccable grammar and correct construction (an English corrector program can easily give you both).  If you want to compose text that’s vibrant and alive, you’ll need to avoid language that drives its quality down a notch and overused phrases will definitely do that.