Like a lot of great poets, William Butler Yeats paid attention to verbs. Pitcured: A 1900 portrait of Yeats by his father, John Butler Yeats. Public domain In the last issue I promised exercises to ...

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 ...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge called metaphor “an act of the imagination,” whereas he relegated simile to “an act of fancy.” Photo from National Portrait Gallery, 1795. Public Domain Samuel Taylor Coleridge ...

The human brain has an affinity for metaphors—a word or phrase that means something other than what it literally denotes. In addition to stimulating higher levels of mental processing, metaphors ...

Read aloud picture books and look for simile examples and metaphor examples to learn how writers use figurative language to make writing beautiful and convey meaning. Use these favorite mentor texts ...

Source: Francesco Bini/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 The most famous of all allegories is the Allegory of the Cave, in which Plato compares unphilosophical people to prisoners who, having spent their ...