In some excellent line-by-line feedback for a recent short story, one of my writing group members called out my used of the phrase “know the drill” because it is a colloquialism. It was a fair critique, and one I’ve made myself on numerous occasions – I believe I’ve critiqued several of the books we’ve reviewed for using such devices. Related to avoiding anachronisms, it is generally best practice to avoid using such stock phrases in your writing because they can be imprecise, are reflective of lazy writing, and can throw a reader out of the story. But – and you surely anticipated there would be a but – there are circumstances where leveraging stock phrases can be appropriate, and even desirable.
The most obvious use case is dialogue in contemporary fiction, when it would be rather strange if none of the characters ever utilized the kinds of phrases we use in real conversation. Even in contemporary fiction, it will mostly be best to avoid them in the narrative itself. Relying on such phrases is exactly what Orwell railed against in his essay “Politics and the English Language.” The language we use has meaning and depths we don’t always consciously recognize – see our recent post on the use of metaphors to describe AI and how they affect our understanding of and relationship with the technology – and stock phrases often convey meanings and suggestions which we don’t fully recognize and which we probably don’t intend when we deploy them in our writing.
Sometimes, though, it is conceivable that we should examine such a stock phrase and find that, in all its dimensions, it fits into the place we’ve identified for it. I am convinced this is the case with the example I mentioned above, in which I used the phrase “know the drill.” The story, you see, is about war, a war in which everyone is involved, and the mortal dimension of the war is at a temporal stage where the soldiers, meaning all humanity in this case, would be intimately familiar with drill and ceremonies. Even in the narrative perspective, therefore, I think using the phrase “know the drill” will actually contribute to the immersivity and worldbuilding of the story, along with the general message which the story is conveying. Everyone in the line into Hamtanah (the scene in the story to which I keep referring) is someone who would literally know the drill and perceive the world through a militaristic, regimented, drill-and-ceremonies lens.
Granted, this is a rather niche application. There may even be an argument to be made that I have overthought the matter to such an extent that I’ve rather missed the point, and the stock phrase will still potentially disrupt a reader’s appreciation of the story no matter how deliberately and consciously I’ve placed it there in my own mind. That, of course, is what makes writing interesting. There is no one correct answer to a question like this, no clean, optimal solution to the conundrum. It’s a fundamentally subjective decision by the author that must be made in preemptive conversation with unknown readers.
Like anachronisms, though, it may be impossible to entirely expunge stock phrases from our narratives. So many of the ways we string words together are themselves a kind of stock phrase, and the way we deploy language is often composed of phrases that aren’t distinct enough to be considered colloquialisms and yet tend to appear in a certain way or a certain place over and over again (like over and over again). It is desirable to be more aware of these, since you can better control and leverage them, but I do not think you would want to eliminate them entirely even if you could, because it could well make the text unreadable. Readers expect a certain rhythm to a sentence, and if you diverge too far, it will take more effort to read and elevate the reading to a different level of conscious processing. Sometimes, that’s precisely what you’ll want, but not always. Stock phrases, therefore, are yet another tool in your toolbox.
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