Gary Olson RespondsAuthor(s): Gary OlsonSource: College English, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Mar., 1983), pp. 310-311Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/377115 .

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310 College English

sults of his survey do not call into question our assumptions about writ- ing or our "condemnation of cliche use." We need not be concerned if students cannot "always recognize them if they try"; we must, however, stress the importance of originality in every step of the observing-thinking- writing process.

David K. Gratz University of Wisconsin Center- Manitowoc County

Gary Olson Responds While Professor Gratz agrees with several aspects of my essay on cliches, he unfortunately has missed the major point. The point is not that we should stop advising students to avoid cliches, but that we should stop treating clich6 use as a simple matter of error recogni- tion. Clearly, clich6 recognition is a much more psychologically complex process than most of us have assumed. Too often, the hasty pedagogue is all too content to slap a large, red CLICHE in the margin of a student's paper and rush on to the next "error." But this is not the way we should treat the subject. We must not assume that the student knows that a figure of speech is a clich6.

Professor Gratz seems to think that when I called for a reexamination of our assumptions, I somehow was re- ferring to the assumption that an origi- nal expression is preferable to a hackneyed one. I believe a careful reading of the essay reveals that I was referring instead to how we approach cliches pedagogically. No one would deny that cliches usually are stale, life- less, and unevocative; none of us would instruct our students to use

clich6s indiscriminately; but too many of us have been quick to penalize a pupil for using a clich6, as if the stu- dent necessarily knew the expression to be a clich6. Continuing research shows that there is a clear lag time be- tween when a writer hears a figure of speech for the first time and when that writer has heard it enough times to de- termine it is a clich6. After all, if a cliche is by definition an expression that is overworked, you must know a particular expression is overworked before you can realize it is a clich6. The thesis of the essay, then, is that we must become sensitive to the sub- jective nature of clich6 recognition, rather than continue to treat it as a simple matter of recognizing errors.

Finally, I am disappointed that Pro- fessor Gratz fails to perceive the sig- nificance of the sub-thesis of the arti- cle: that some clich6s may be genera- tional in nature. This discovery could prove revolutionary, since it chal- lenges our very concept of a cliche. If an expression that was once a cliche falls into disuse, then it is no longer by definition a cliche: a hackneyed figure of speech. Once an expression be- comes a non-cliche, is it then accepta- ble to use it? Is it necessary to con- demn its use? Fifty years ago a very popular cliche was "snappy roadster." Now, of course, we rarely hear the ex- pression, due partly to the fact that the word roadster has fallen into disuse. Is snappy roadster still a cliche? I wonder if Professor Gratz knows that it once was. And I wonder if he would object if one of his students were to find it appropriate to use the expression in an essay. Currently Louis Middleman (au- thor of In Short) and I are conducting an extensive national research study to determine if in fact generational clich6s

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Comment and Response 311

exist. The preliminary results strongly suggest that they do.

I assure Professor Gratz that there is no one more devoted to linguistic originality than I am; and in no way do I suggest that we stop teaching stu- dents to search for fresh, vital expres- sions; but we must learn that the clich6 is not a black-and-white, objective

phenomenon (like a comma splice, for example). In teaching students about cliches, we must concentrate on de- veloping their sensitivity to and awareness of language, not their paranoia about another error category.

University of North Carolina

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