How To Avoid Cliché In Your Dissertation Writing? A Complete Guide
Clichés are the most frequent mistakes often found in Bachelor’s level dissertations. In fact, Clichés are not among the grammatical mistakes. Rather, their aim is to improve your writing standards. By avoiding Clichés, you can eradicate possible wordy sentences from your dissertation writing.
What Is Cliché In Dissertation Writing?
Cliché and stereotype have somewhat similar meanings in dissertation writing. The French discovered both terms. Besides, both words have a negative meaning in the modern language. The literal meaning of these two words is that of ‘Printing block’. Here, the term printing block refers to ‘the moulds’ that printers used to make several print copies. Even in French, these two terms namely stereotype and clichés, are interchangeable. But in the modern sense, clichés refer to the overuse of some common phrases, terms, or words. These are beneficial in the case of dissertation writing. But now, ‘stereotype’ refers to the set of uncommon briefs that a group of people have about particular characteristics of things.
In other words, an example of Cliché is as follows;
‘The expression or idea that was a part of classical writing. And with time due to its over-use, people start thinking of it as an old-fashion or outdated one.’
According to many researchers, dissertation writers must avoid it. The reason for this is that readers often overlook clichés in the manuscript. From the readers’ perceptive, they unconsciously avoid the sentence containing clichés. Their eye and brain skip such phrases and they go ahead. Besides, these words are not meaningless. Rather, after they’re overused, they become ignorant terms.
Why Should You Avoid Clichés In Dissertation Writing?
Most people will consider you lazy, or less imaginative after finding old-fashioned phrases within your dissertation. Further, there are many terms that reshape themselves with time. So in modern use, some of these phrases have opposite meanings. Still, by avoiding clichés, your dissertation will have a good impact on the public. For example,
The phrase ‘I promise’ was later considered as ‘I will undoubtedly do it,’. But now it means ‘I would not manage it in modern use. Likewise, people say, ‘I will leave no stone unturned. Currently, this phrase means ‘I’m not going to do anything. But later it was considered that ‘I will not leave anything untouched. Hence, the purpose of this article is to tell you that you should reshape your approach. Up-to-date knowledge will help you in getting a better reader’s response. You should read the following section to get a comprehensive guide.
How To Avoid Cliché In Dissertation Writing: A Comprehensive Guide
The following steps as shared by experts of dissertation writing services are simple enough to be accomplished. But yes, it demands persistence. Still, by following these steps, you can enhance the impact factor of your work.
Step 1: How To Identify Clichés?
The first step in producing a cliché free dissertation is its identification. But how should one go about it? For this, you should read someone’s work and think about the following aspects;
- Does it contain repeated words that irritate you?
- How do you feel about reading a phrase over and over again?
- Identify the words that your eyes skip while reading a long passage.
- What is your review of someone else’s dissertation writing?
An exercise to answer the above four questions every time you read an article is important. This is because it’ll help you in getting up-to-date linguistic information. Still, you can make notes of points that irritate you as a reader. It will automatically prepare a Do’s or don’ts list for dissertation writing.
Step 2: Think Before You Write
Locating clichés as a writer is a little difficult as compared to doing it as a reader. Hence, the important thing is to try to identify clichés by reviewing someone else’s work. After picking such clichés, you will avoid them in dissertation writing.
Hence, the second step in avoiding Clichés is being focused. Before writing, think about what this sentence means. Are your words conveying what’s in your mind? These things will minimise the aspect of cliché in your writing.
Further, students often include such phrases after getting tired. The inclusion of such phrases helps students in meeting the target with little effort. So if you get exhausted from long-term writing practices, take a break instead of using clichés. There is no doubt that clichés will help you in meeting your word-count targets. But they will decrease the impact of your research as well.
Step 3: Don’t Do Word To Word Paraphrasing
In dissertation writing, you should avoid word-to-word paraphrasing. Word-to-word rephrasing will unintentionally add clichés to your work. So in dissertation writing, first you just need to read a concept. Then get some points and write what you noted with proper references.
But many students copy a long text from an academic paper and paste it into their work. Even without knowing what the original author wants to say, they just reshuffle words. In such cases, clichés, thin critical analysis, or other grammatical errors occur. So at the third step in the clichés avoiding guide, you need to follow standard paraphrasing rules. These will help in the resolution of such issues.
Give Multiple Revisions To Avoid Clichés
Sometimes to maintain a flow in dissertation writing, some students mistakenly include cliché. The best possible way to avoid it is through proofreading. If you want to produce error-free content, you should revise your writing as many times as you can. You can proofread your dissertation at some specific points to get perfection as well. These points are highlighted as follows;
- After every sentence, take a glance to locate any grammatical, spelling, or typo errors.
- After completing each paragraph, proofread to resolve coherency-related issues.
- Still, before going to the next page, revise the previous one. It will resolve the structuring and formatting errors.
- Further, after completing the dissertation, seek help from other scholars to identify any errors. You can spend one or two days detecting the clichés.
Hence, after each step, you will find yourself closer to error-free writing.
