What is Figurative Language?

It’s

• the use of words in nonliteral ways:
  • Personification & Metaphor Examples: “Your government is working night and day to repel this virus, and we will succeed, just as this country has seen off every alien invader for the last thousand years” (Boris Johnson)
• a tool writers, speakers, knowledge workers . . . use
  • to make their compositions more engaging and clearer.
  • to project an appropriate voice, tone, persona
• an attribute of prose, a style of writing, that is common among poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers.

Types of Figurative Language

• Idiom
• Metaphor
• Personification
• Simile

Related Concepts: Concrete, Sensory Writing; Description; Code Switching; Figurative Language; Given to New Contract; Register; Vague Language; Writer-Based Prose Style

What Does Figurative Language Matter?

“All the world’s a stage”—have you ever wondered why people remember and quote lines from Shakespeare so much?

One of the reasons is because he used figurative language very effectively in his writings.

You may have heard the term figurative language before, and perhaps when you heard it you were in a class analyzing novels or poetry. But it’s not just used in literature: you can employ it in your academic and workplace writing to great effect.

Figurative language adds color to your writing by taking your words and applying them to other, often unexpected, objects or concepts.

Writers, speakers, knowledge workers . . . use figurative language to make a text more clear, engaging, interesting, evocative. Because figurative language is more dramatic and visual than concrete, sensory language, it enables you to better arrest your reader’s attention and perhaps cause him/her/they to pause and think more about your assertions. 

When interpreting texts, metaphors, similes, and personification can help you better understand complex and abstract ideas because you are attaching these abstract ideas to an image or human role and in that way making it more concrete and understandable.

Figurative language can also just make your writing more pleasurable to read and consequently more likely to gain your reader’s thoughtful consideration.  We all like to be entertained, even in just little ways, and are more likely to pay attention to things that seek to interest us.

Figurative Language, Clarity & Readability

1. Engage in rhetorical analysis. Practice rhetorical reasoning to ensure that the use of figurative language is appropriate for your rhetorical context. Some genres—especially genres of poetry and fiction—rely extensively whereas other genres reject the use of figurative language or call for sparase use figurative language. Thus, as always, you need to engage in rhetorical analysis in order to determine whether or not it’s appropriate to use figurative language.
   
2. Make your metaphors and similes understandable (you want to interest and intrigue your reader!)
   
3. Stay away from clichéd comparisons (what’s the point of using figurative language if you’re just going to recycle the same tired metaphors?)
   
4. Avoid using too much figurative language (a little goes a long way).
   
5. Figurative language can be used in any part of your text. 

Recommended Resources

Plain Language: Beyond a Movement.