Dependable as a dictionary, commentator Paula LaRocque explores the power of the simile. I recently read a simile that made me laugh aloud. A simile, as you know, is a comparison that uses the words ...

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 ...

Like simile, metaphor, personification and hyperbole, irony is a very useful figure of speech. Writers and other creative workers regularly make use of it, including comedians. It can, however, also ...

"Narcissus" by Caravaggio (c. 1598). Source: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain What is an allegory? An allegory (Greek, "a speaking about something else") is a complete and cohesive narrative, for ...

Literary devices are specific ways of using language or other literary elements that we can recognise and identify in a text (a piece of writing). These can work either at a word or sentence level or ...

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 ...

The inner and outer forecasts don’t always match up. This short poem by Louise Glück starts out cold and stays that way for most of its 11 lines. And then it bursts into flame. At first, the emotional ...