Today in class the students learned about cliche: what makes something cliche and how to avoid using cliche in one’s writing. The activity we did to practice avoiding cliche involved looking at a photo of a starry night sky and writing descriptions that avoided the obvious cliched descriptions like, “The stars shone like diamonds.”

(This lesson and activity, by the way, was taught by one of my students. They’ve all been taking turns teaching the class about literary/rhetorical terms and facilitating writing activities to reinforce the lessons.)

Since I try to write alongside my students, I too participated in the activity. My attempt was as follows: “The stars were flecks of milk painted on the faded gray of an old barn.”

I’m not sure I like this description, but it does make me laugh to think of the stars as flecks of milk. It’s definitely a weird way of describing something we typically think of as beautiful.

Anyway, I avoided using a cliche.