A Self Made of Words: Crafting a Distinctive Persona in Nonfiction Writing

Figurative Language

54 } Fora distinctivewayofexpressing your ideas and projectingyourself ,there’snothingquitelikeawell-­turnedbitof figurative language, also known as a figureof speech. Figures of speech use language creatively by altering either the literal meaning and/or the usual arrangement of words.The most well-­known figures, such as metaphors, equate things that are not identical, as in “all the world’s a stage,” or “my towering oak is an air conditioner.” If the metaphor is developed at length, it’s known as an extended metaphor, as in these lines from Shakespeare’s As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players: / They have their exits and their entrances; / And one man in his time plays many parts, / His acts being seven ages.” If the equation is expressed in the explicit form of an analogy, it’s known as a simile, as in “she put on her makeup with painstaking care, like an actress getting ready to appear on stage.” If the equation attributes human qualities to animals or inanimate things, it’s known as personification, as in “the drought has lasted so long that all the trees and shrubs are yearning for rain.” And if the equation involves an exaggeration , it’s known as a hyperbole, as when someone who is tired says “I’m dead,” or someone who is hungry says “I’m starving.” These are just a handful of the many figFigurative Language { 55 ures, known as tropes, that deviate from the literal meaning or the actual nature of things. Other figures of speech, known as schemes, rather than altering the usual sense of things deviate from the customaryarrangement or selection ofwords.Oneof the most obvious but also most emphatic is an inversion of normal word order, as in “down the snow-­ covered slope slid he,” which in this example involves not only a reversal of the ordinary subject-­predicate word order but also another type of figure known as alliteration, namely the deliberate use of words that begin with the same consonant . Both of these schemes, like many others, are used for emphasis, as in anaphora, which involves a series of phrases, clauses, or sentences, each of which begins with the sameword or phrase: “Down the snow-­covered slope slid he, down the bare-­faced rock below, down and down toward the end of his life.” A few segments later we’ll look in detail at some other schemes that can make a significant contribution to your prose style and voice, such as parallelism, balance, serial constructions, and periodic constructions. The challenge in using figures of speech is to avoid ones that have been overused and thus are often spoken ofas being “tired”or “dead,”personifications that are themselves tired and dead. Better to make them up on your own, so they’re fresh as newly fallen snow and just as vivid. As with any element of writing, the use of figurative language requires a sense of tact and care, as well as a concern for the purpose of your piece and the way you’re trying to come across in it. Here, for example, is the paragraph about my tonsillectomy, revised to incorporate a few figures of speech: 56 } I was ten years old, about to have my tonsils taken out, and I didn’t like the idea of someone going deep into the back of my mouth with a scalpel in hand, as if I was the victim in a gruesome torture tale. Nor did I like the idea of being put to sleep with an anesthetic. So you can imagine how I felt when one of the doctors in the operating room put a mask over my nose and mouth and told me to count quickly to fifty. No sooner did I get to eleven than the doctors, the nurses, and everything else in the operating room were spinning and spinning, as if they’d been swept up in a tornado. The next thing I saw was a nurse smiling by my bedside, asking if I’d like a dish of ice cream to soothe my throat. Such a swift and dizzying change of scene that I wondered if I had died and gone to heaven, for she sure was an angel. In revising this passage, my main intent was to give it more spunk by adding a few figures of speech that would dramatize the way...