Why Do Writers Use Figurative Language?

What's the difference between reading a dictionary and experiencing a novel, film or poem? Worlds of difference. This is where figurative language comes in--creative writers use metaphor, analogy, symbols and more to stir the reader's imagination and bring out the emotion and understanding that can't be expressed by the words' dictionary meaning alone.

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Significance
- What's more compelling--reading about a river that is deep and fast, and dangerous; or about one that's "deeper than darkness and with a current that's faster and deadlier than a starving tiger"? The answer's clear. Figurative language draws you into the story.
It's a Rhetorical Tool
- Language that draws you in does so by prodding your imagination so that your brain needs to know more. Ancient storytellers needed all the rhetorical tools they could get to keep people listening, and they found the best ones by exaggerating and stretching words to get the most extreme meaning possible.
Types
- Types of figurative language include simile and metaphor, personification, alliteration, onomatopoeia, hyperbole, idioms, overstatement and understatement. All are ways of pushing the language past the sum literal meaning of its parts.
Identification
- If something doesn't make sense rationally, or logically, and yet you didn't care, it's probably an effective use of figurative language. No one's ever been so hungry they could eat an elephant, but the reader easily gets the point of the phrase.
Applying Figurative Language
- The ways of applying figurative language depend on what you want to get across. If you have, say, a short cautious man and a tall plodding man, you'll want to employ a comparison that's over the top--"as they moved among the crowds, one took quick and safe steps like a squirrel while the other hovered and lingered, a giraffe."
Warning
- Watch out for clichés--figurative language that's overused only dulls the imagination and makes the audience want something else. How many times have you read that someone's as "quick as a whip?" That's pretty fast, but did you care?