Cliche Detector
Find the phrases your reader's eye slides right over.
Paste your prose and scan for 400+ cliches, dead metaphors, and overused expressions. Every flagged phrase shows you exactly where your writing reached for the familiar instead of the specific.
A cliche is a phrase that has been repeated so many times it no longer creates an image. The reader's eye slides over it. That is the opposite of what prose is supposed to do.
This tool scans your fiction or memoir against 400+ known cliches, dead metaphors, emotion shortcuts, and body-language cliches. It gives you a count, a per-500-word density rate, flagged phrase pills, and an annotated version of your prose. Writers who workshop at Writers' CLC in Reading, MA consistently find this tool useful during revision. Free, instant, no signup.
Flagged phrases are highlighted. Hover or tap to see the phrase.
Finding your own specific language — the image that belongs only to this scene, this character, this moment — is exactly the work our prose craft courses cover.
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Everything runs in your browser. When you paste your work, it never leaves your device. We do not store, log, transmit, or read your writing. You own it completely, before and after you use this tool.
This tool uses rule-based pattern matching and established craft criteria, not a language model. That means the feedback is transparent, consistent, and based on principles you can look up and verify. If it flags something, you can see exactly why.
The criteria behind this tool draw from the foundational texts of the craft: John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction, Robert McKee's Story, and the practical workshop traditions these works inform. The Writers' CLC instructors contributed to the criteria development.
These tools identify patterns. They do not make creative decisions. A flag is a prompt to look at a sentence more carefully, not a mandate to change it. The best use of any diagnostic tool is to notice patterns, then apply your own judgment about what serves the work.
- On Writing by Stephen King — direct on the subject of cliches and finding original language.
- The Elements of Style by Strunk & White — Rule 16: Prefer the specific to the general.
- Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway — excellent on concrete detail and avoiding abstraction.
- Writers' CLC Prose Craft Courses — workshops focused on developing original, specific prose.
