Outdated Phrases to Retire for Good:
Recently I attended a wonderful reading of poetry and prose. I particularly enjoyed an award-winning short story until I heard the phrase, “truth be told…” I found it so jarring, so out of place, that it pulled me right out of the moment.
Maybe that’s why the short story didn’t win first place.
Don’t use the phrase “Truth be told” in your writing, unless you purposely want it to sound antiquated. I’m not talking just about the cliché, but dated language that can make otherwise fresh writing feel tired or generic.
Let’s not stop with the truth. Retire these as well:
- At the end of the day
- As fate would have it
- Little did they know
- Suffice it to say
- As luck would have it
- When all is said and done
And dump the wise narrator lines too
- The rest was history
- It was a day they’d never forget
- They were never the same again
- Life had other plans
- It was meant to be
Your readers deserve prose that sounds alive, not recycled from a 1950s melodrama.
Freshen Your Prose
So what should you do? Let your characters or narrators speak in their own, natural voices. Replace broad, universal statements and clichés with specific images, thoughts, or sensations.
Instead of “Little did they know,” show the moment of irony through action or subtext. Instead of “Life had other plans,” reveal how the twist hits the character personally through a missed call, the wrong turn, the words they wish they hadn’t said.
Fresh writing doesn’t rely on hand-me-down phrasing; it invites readers into a moment that feels uniquely yours.
Also see Beyond the Easy Gesture in Fiction
Don’t Go Easy on Dialogue
Beyond the Smile: Elevating Characters and Emotions
Thank you for visiting! Author Linda K. Sienkiewicz is a wrangler of words and big messy feelings in fiction and poetry. Her second novel, Love and Other Incurable Ailments, is coming October 27, 2026, from Regal House Publishing: When love letters from a despondent stranger land in her lap, an anxious overthinker becomes convinced she’s the cure, and sets off to save him, and herself, blissfully armed with nothing but magical thinking.
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These are so hard to ferret out. I have another one that popped up on a commercial recently. Billy Bob Thornton is hawking T-Mobile and starts a sentence with ‘You see,’ then goes on to school us about our technology choices. IDK about you, but I NEVER say ‘you see’ to preface a sentence when I’m actually speaking to another human being. So why use it in our writing? Just sounds so old school omniscient narrator to me.
No kidding! Gotta watch out for those “old school omniscient narrator” cliches. I’ve been making tiktok reels, and I often start out with “So…” or “You know…” and then I have to trim that out. Oof.