Patrick Forsyth presents some thoughts about descriptions to use or avoid.
It was film producer Sam Goldwyn who first said that ‘you should avoid clichés like the plague’. The maxim is repeated by most writing guides and courses, the point being that such descriptions, while once fresh and even novel, have been used so much that they are now colourless or trite. Yet it can be curiously difficult to write at any length without resorting, by accident or design, to cliché. Travel writers maybe have a particular problem.