Getting the fruit from branches closer to the ground is the easy option in sales, business, politics and writing.

Low-hanging fruit is popular in the commercial world where it is used to identify the quickest business to acquire. The harder climb to the top of the tree of life takes longer.

The phrase has successfully crossed into journalism via the business pages where it appears up to 400 times a month across the world.

“With the low hanging fruit gone, the gains to productivity from the likes of the Internet are relatively smaller.” (Wall Street Journal, July 25)

“This year, the incumbent is again the favorite, but such low-hanging fruit may not seem so easy to find.” (Barron’s, July 9)

“Billions and billions of dollars of low-hanging fruit are listed in these reports.” (The Telegraph, Nashua, USA, July 8)

“There is plenty of low-hanging fruit that even minimally competent governance should have been able to deliver.” (Dhaka Courier, July 7)

“But that also means finding a way to pay for it and a bloated public sector is the low-hanging fruit.” (The Advertiser, South Australia, July 7)

“Misspelled street signs are the low-hanging fruit of feature journalism.” (New York Times, July 6)

Cliché of the Week appears in The Australian newspaper Mondays. Clichés in the media are tracked across the world using Factiva and Dow Jones Insight.

Chris Pash’s book, The Last Whale , a true story set in the 1970s, was published by Fremantle Press in 2008.