Verlyn Klinkenborg

You were being taught to write as part of a transaction that had
Almost nothing to do with real communication,

You were also learning to distrust the reader and yourself.

And to use passive constructions, which absolve everyone of responsibility.
What’s a metaphor in the prose you were taught to write?
A stage prop, a paraphrase, a clarification, at best,
Nearly always cumbersome, bordering on cliché,
Almost always timid, rarely serious, usually self-conscious,

A true metaphor is a swift and violent twisting of language,
A renaming of the already named.
It’s meant to expire in a sudden flash of light
And to reveal—in that burst of illumination—
A correspondence that must be literally accurate.

You may notice, as you write, that sentences often volunteer a shape of their own
And supply their own words as if they anticipated your thinking.
Those sentences are nearly always unacceptable,
Dull and unvarying, yielding only a small number of possible structures
And only the most predictable phrases, the inevitable clichés.
A cliché is dead matter.
It causes gangrene in the prose around it, and sooner or later it eats your brain.
You can’t fix a cliché by using it ironically.

A cliché isn’t just a familiar, overused saying.
It’s the debris of someone else’s thinking,
Any group of words that seem to cluster together “naturally”
And enlist in your sentence.
The only thing to do with a cliché is send it to the sports page
Or the speechwriters, where it will live forever.

When the work is really complete, the writer knows how each sentence got that way,
What choices were made.

I mean a pale and nameless unease,
As if a poorly constructed sentence could make you slightly homesick.

The malaise given off by an awkwardness in the syntax.
You won’t be able to name the feeling a syntactical problem causes.
It doesn’t have a name.

Where do they come from?
What line of work are they in?
Who’s likely to use them?
And in what context?
This will remind you that every word carries a social freight.