New ideas are often easier to grasp if they are presented in the more vivid context of a specific example or in analogy to some familiar image. Figures of speech--metaphor ("The river was an ancient witness"), simile ("The river advanced deliberately, like a dignified village elder"), personification ("old man river"), and so on--are all means of bringing writing to life in this fashion, much as the parable animates moral teaching or as role playing stimulates psychological insight. These livelier modes of expression, if used sparingly, have the virtue of focusing the reader's attention and clarifying the writer's position; in skilled hands, figures of speech instill prose with grace and beauty. But, as with any other device, they will distract and obscure if used excessively ("Old man river was an ancient witness who advanced deliberately as if he were a village elder"), imprecisely ("The winding river bore the crooked smile of a toothless hag") or inaccurately ("The icy river foamed with a fiery dullness").
Two warnings seem particularly relevant to unpracticed writers. First, take great care to avoid mixing metaphors, whether intentionally ("The angry river foamed like a glass of beer"), or unintentionally ("The raging torrent of words dried my pool of resolve"). Second, use extended metaphor Ñ the "conceit"--cautiously if at all, since readers' efforts to follow the clever elaboration of your original analogy may eventually cost them the memory of the idea you chose to embellish.
Writers can make unintentionally comic mistakes when they fail to realize that abstract, neutral-looking Latin words may be "dead metaphors" -- metaphors that can return embarrassingly to life when the reader is more aware of etymology than the writer. For instance, a student writing a paper about the Iliad may wish to say that the poem makes us think about the complexities of death. He unwittingly writes:
In the Iliad death becomes a multi-faceted subject for rumination.Gems have facets (and so, metaphorically, does a complex problem); a cow ruminates (and so do people, metaphorically, when they "chew over" ideas). But the two metaphors do not mix well; gems do not belong in a cow's stomach.
Copyright 1996 Yale University. Revised on Monday, May 20, 1996