Avoid cliche's...and other things my aunt taught me

The host recalls a Jack McDade video in which McDade says “do something unexpected” while walking beside a pool with a GoPro on a selfie stick. As he speaks, he falls backward into the pool, making it look as though the world is dropping away, while he keeps filming underwater. The host says the video captures the principle he wants to discuss: in writing, design, and perhaps programming, avoid clichés. Clichés are obvious choices that weaken originality and impact, whereas an unexpected choice can make the work memorable.

The host describes showing a school writing assignment to his aunt, an English teacher, poet, and serious student of literature. He had assumed good writing meant using “fancy” language, but her notes introduced him to a more precise standard. She marked one passage as a mixed metaphor, a concept he had never encountered, and he decided to make his metaphors “follow through.” He illustrates the problem with combinations such as “cross that bridge when we come to it” mixed with “don’t rock the boat,” or “nip this problem in the bud before it snowballs out of control.”

The host remembers an argument between his aunt and her son, his cousin and friend, about pronouns. He emphasizes that it was a grammatical and literary argument, not an identity-politics dispute. His aunt objected that using singular “they” in a sentence such as “they went and got the laundry” could lose specificity because “they” might also mean multiple people; English lacked, in her view at that time, a clearly gender-neutral singular equivalent to “he went.” The host found her insistence that language be specific surprisingly strong, and recalls other guidance and books she gave him, including The Elements of Style and a secretly supplied copy of On the Origin of Species.

The host defines a cliché as a phrase used so often that it has lost its originality or impact. Examples include “at the end of the day,” “think outside the box,” “everything happens for a reason,” “actions speak louder than words,” and “the sky’s the limit.” He says novice writers reach for clichés because they seem to add color, but learning to write better means noticing and eliminating them—or using the familiar phrase as an opening to say something genuinely original. The same problem appears in speech, where people often do not realize how frequently they use stock expressions.

Applying the idea to design, the host says a landing page can become a string of expected elements: a centered hero, a large app screenshot, three feature cards with icons, testimonials, and logos. AI-generated copy and layouts intensify this tendency, producing phrases such as “transform your workflow” or “supercharge your workflow,” along with purple gradients, glowing orbs, floating cards, translucent panels, and sparkles. For Paraframe, his AI design tool, he wants no sparkles in the product UI, even if they appear in generated designs. He distinguishes these clichés from conventions: a familiar hero structure or a down-chevron on a dropdown gives users a usable “hook” and reduces the need to learn unfamiliar behavior.

The host admits he had made a highly cliched landing page for Paraframe, spent substantial time on it, and then decided to remove it. His replacement is more conventional in structure but more impactful in execution: a single page, one above-the-fold desktop screen, no scrolling, and only the essential message. He says every pixel and line should carry weight, with a hierarchy familiar enough for visitors to absorb what they need quickly. The difficult discipline is asking what he actually wants to communicate instead of automatically reaching for claims such as “the best tool ever” or “good design is discovered, not generated.”