What it finds
The finder checks your text against our list of 337 stock phrases. About 240 are ordinary clichés (“at the end of the day”, “in the nick of time”, “few and far between”). The rest are business and office jargon (“circle back”, “move the needle”, “low-hanging fruit”, “going forward”). Each match is marked with a wavy underline and listed with a plainer alternative or a short piece of advice.
Matching is on whole words, in any capitalization. Hyphenated spellings count too, so “low-hanging fruit” and “low hanging fruit” are both found. The full list is published at clichés and jargon.
Why clichés weaken writing
A cliché was vivid once. Repetition wore the picture off, so readers now skim past it without seeing anything. “Think outside the box” no longer makes anyone picture a box. Worse, a stock phrase often stands in for the specific thing you meant to say. “We need to move the needle” hides what should change, and by how much.
Jargon has a second cost: it signals that you are writing for insiders. Readers outside the group feel shut out, and readers inside it skim.
What to do with a match
For each highlight, ask what you actually mean, and say that.
Before: Going forward, we need to think outside the box to move the needle on customer satisfaction.
After: Next year we want complaints about delivery to fall by half. That means trying new carriers.
The fix is rarely a one-word swap. Usually the cliché was covering a gap: a missing number, a missing name, a missing reason. Fill the gap and the cliché has nothing left to do.
Sometimes a familiar phrase is the right one. In dialogue, in a deliberately casual piece, or when you play with the phrase, keep it. The finder marks phrases; it does not judge them. The guide Avoiding clichés has more examples.
Why wasn’t my favourite cliché found?
The list is curated, not exhaustive. We left out phrases that are often used literally (“on the same page” in a printing manual) and idioms too common to count as stale. If a phrase feels tired to you, it probably is.
Does it work on other variants of a phrase?
Only the exact wording and its hyphenated forms. “At the end of the day” is found; “when all is said and done, at day’s end” is not.