Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Huddled MSS

cliché--an overused meaning or rhetorical device; a stock character or dramatic situation that precludes or at least stifles any potential for originality; a form of literary shorthand that presents a person, place, circumstance, or thing in such a commonplace way as to avoid any further need for description or individuation; a deliberate or unconscious statement from the author that all is vanilla.

One of the more persistent cliches is a four-to-five-hundred-word feature composed of as many cliches as possible, demonstrating dramatically how what was once fresh and plangent with originality has become trite and predictable. Another is the easy-as-pie Internet cliche finder. Most cliches were at the time of their origin an highly visual or descriptive trope that became overused because of its clarity but has become through overuse an irritant.

Cliches do not stop as catch phrases, they extend to characters such as the absent-minded academic, the hit-person-for-hire who is kind to animals, the Irish cop, the Jewish pawnbroker or banker, the Italian criminal, the lazy Mexican, the red-neck Southerner, the effeminate male homosexual, the butch female homosexual, the bored housewife, etc.

The acquisitions editor confronted with an engaging story is likely to begin with a higher tolerance to an occasional cliche, growing more alert to these infractions if they persist. Thus the cliche joins the comma splice, indifferent spelling, and questionable usage as mechanical causes for rejection. The dedicated writer makes a search-and-destroy (probable cliche here) anti-cliche mission a part of every revision, starting with word usage then moving to an examination of each character who makes an appearance, finishing with any characters who may be mentioned but not brought on stage, thus coping effectively with the built-in writers' hubris of writing unquestionably cliche-free prose.

Get a Room, Editorially Speaking

stet--from Latin stare (to be) for "let it be" or "let it stand"; editor or proofreader notation indicating a marked word or passage on a manuscript or proof is to stand as now indicated; a writer's note to an editorial suggestion or deletion, thus an authorial override on an editorial opinion.

Editors have a complex menu of responses to matter included in a manuscript, ranging from the highly idiosyncratic to the recognition of house conventions. Some responses relate to the use by the author of comma splices or Arabic numerals instead of spelled-out numbers. Other responses are more substantive, involving material the author wants in the final text as opposed to the same material the editor would like to see omitted from the text. When an author answers an Author Query or AuQy on the manuscript with a stet, the author is having the last word, presumably after taking the editor's query or suggestion into serious consideration.

By the time the decision is made to publish a particular work, and the deal has been contracted, notes and queries from the content editor are considered friendly, helpful suggestions, particularly since the editor was probably a party to the arrangement for publication. Editorial notes and suggestions made after the fact of contract are not mandates; the agreement or contract may have had provisional mandates--change the narration from third to first person, make the ending a happy ending,don't kill off Uncle Fred--and the writer will have been aware of these. The stet decisions involve last-minute details. Example: An editor may conclude that a particular exchange of dialogue will by its very use of words and specifics convey that Ms. Kitty is angrily energized and thus mark for deletion the attribution "Ms. Kitty said hotly" as a goes-without-saying notation. But the writer, wanting the reader to be sure of Ms. Kitty's frame of emotional mind, may say stet, at which point the editor says OK before moving on to the next matter.

Copyeditors are less likely to query on usage; their work is mechanical intervention in the service of consistency of use according to a house style (if book, the style guide is likely to be CMOS Chicago Manual of Style); if magazine or newspaper, more likely to be AP, NY Times, or a style guide based on these). Writers are not likely to get into stet decisions with copyeditors unless the copyeditor is challenging a statement the writer has set as a fact. For an example, in a story in which the writer has claimed that a character who is a professional boxer bears a stylistic resemblance to Muhammad Ali, the copyeditor may circle Muhammad Ali and write in the margin "who he?" The writer may believe Mr. Ali's name needs no attribution and thus lines out the query, then writes stet.