Today, I’d like to present a new (possibly recurring) blog series. I was reading a college's literary magazine today. While most of the entries were aggressively mediocre, one particular phrase in one particular story stuck out to me. "I could still make out the tear stains on my mom's letter pages." What better catalyst for discussion than a cliché?

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Today, I’d like to discuss a cliché that is very common in children’s media, and actually shows up in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic a few times. The irony is that, even as a child, I recognized and disliked this particular cliché. In particular, I remember it from both Dragonball Z and Digimon Frontier, among others. Captain Planet even built its entire premise around this cliché (well, that and being preachy, but let’s not get sidetracked).

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Today's discussion is about a very old cliche. It is so ubiquitous that I'm many of you have encountered it in multiple places before. Just because it is commonplace, however, doesn't mean that we can't examine it and try to do better.

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My previous LDC post was about a very omnipresent cliché. Today, I’d like to discuss a similarly common, and no less frustrating trope; the phonetic accent.

What is it? The phonetic accent is when a writer attempts to spell a word how it sounds. There is (usually) no guidelines or reasoning to it, and it’s often far disconnected from normal spelling.

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