Dec 9, 2025
Five Watch Writing Cliches that We Need to Retire
According to Worn & Wound’s content management system, I’ve authored over 1,500 articles for this website. That’s a lot! A big percentage of those articles have been spent simply describing watches, and giving you my impressions and thoughts on how they succeed and fail in doing whatever it is they’re trying to do (besides keep time – that’s basically assumed going in). Over the course of 1,500 articles, I’m 100% positive that I’ve been guilty of using many of the watch writer cliches that all of us try to avoid. But it’s hard! There are only so many ways, after all, that you can communicate in writing that a particular color provides an accent on the dial, or that a bit of finishing is impressive but not mind blowing, or that the specs don’t tell the whole story of how a watch is experienced when you’re wearing it. Over time, I’ve tried to mitigate the use of cliches by simply not writing about the things that are so obvious they fall into the realm of cliche. For example: if a watch has a red seconds hand, you can see that it has a red seconds hand in the photos. There’s no need for me to characterize the red as a “splash” or a “pop” or anything else. It’s there. You, the reader, are intelligent and can decide if you like it or not, whether it needs to be splashier or poppier. I try to give you my thoughts on the whole package, cohesively. If I have any! I have to admit, sometimes, a watch is just a watch to me. It can be a perfectly...
Monochrome
