The trite stuff. (Cliches refreshed.)

WASHINGTON, DC: In addition to nitpicking my column to death every week, Tom the Butcher also does freelance editing, so he sees a lot of manuscripts. Some of them are from elegant writers; some are, to put it mildly, not. Without naming names, Tom occasionally shares with me a particularly egregious paragraph or two from his inbox. A recent one, from an attempted serious novel, read something like this:

Evan heaved a sigh of relief. Yes, all hell had broken loose and his dream had turned into a nightmare, putting him on an emotional roller coaster. But in the wake of recent developments, there was a ray of hope, and a chance for cautious optimism.