Read aloud picture books and look for simile examples and metaphor examples to learn how writers use figurative language to ...

Marble bust of Aristotle. Public domain. Metaphors are not user-friendly. They are hard to find and hard to use well. Unfortunately, metaphor is a mainstay of good lyric writing; indeed, of most ...

The player kicked the ball. The patient kicked the habit. The villain kicked the bucket. The verbs are the same. The syntax is identical. The player kicked the ball. The patient kicked the habit. The ...

Pierre-Paul Delvaux exhorts that unlike poetic metaphor, which aims to make the familiar unusual, pedagogical metaphor aims to make the unusual familiar. "[...] There is in the use of pedagogical ...

"Narcissus" by Caravaggio (c. 1598). Source: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain What is an allegory? An allegory (Greek, "a speaking about something else") is a complete and cohesive narrative, for ...

Jan. 14-20 is Idiom Week, and today we thought we’d have a heart-to-heart about some strange phrases we use. Idioms, metaphors and similes are all types of figurative language. According to ...

It can be quite revealing to tune in to the kind of imagery people use when talking. Consider, for example, how people speak about the current economic crisis. Some view the economy as a complex ...

Metaphors and other figurative language are deeply woven into the fabric of human communication, as this very sentence actually demonstrates. But how do our brains translate these metaphors into ...

"You have to win the battle against depression", "what counts is not surrendering" and "this is not a short road" are examples of conceptual metaphors typically used to describe experiences and issues ...