writercises | Entries tagged with analogy

Original Posting 2021/5/21

There is a funny bit going around on Facebook, where some poor guy is whispering into his lady love's ear about how he thinks there is a landscape inside every woman, that needs to be unfolded... it ends with him saying, "Let's construct an assemblage."

Now, admittedly, it's kind of a rough and ready version of romance (when I read it, I was reminded of the old joke about the guy who asks women a fairly rude question, and someone asks what happens? He says he usually gets slapped, but once in a while... constructing an assemblage seems almost as far out). But it suggests an interesting twist.

Take an analogy, a process, something like that. Now, wrap it up in a romantic meeting between your two lovers. You can make it their first date, a somewhat more steamy scene, or even an outright adult scene, but let one of them be trying to lay out this analogy as part of their dialogue.

So, perhaps they see the relationship as a chess game, and they are about to force a checkmate? Or it's like automobile repair, and we're about to make the engine run? Or... go ahead, take your wildest analogy, and wrap it in a romantic dialogue.

Write that scene!

mbarker

Original Posting 2021/4/17

Writer's Digest, July 1994, p. 24-27, had an article by Michael Ray Taylor about fleshing out your writing. He suggest you draw. Oh, not literally, most of us aren't artists enough for that. No, DRAW is an acronym for delineate, ruminate, analogize, and write. Here's his four steps.

Delineate. Make a list. Refine and develop your ideas by listing, and then picking examples. Then for each example, make a list of the sensory aspects of that idea or example. He suggests timing yourself, give yourself 5 to 10 minutes per point.

Ruminate. Summon a vision. Look at your list about one idea or element. Close your eyes, and think about it. Is it primarily visual? What does it suggest? You can add things to your list at this point. This also is timed, 3 to 5 minutes per item.

Analogize. What's it like? For each item, come up with some other things, idea, or image that describes it in an unusual or creative way. Go ahead and write those comparisons down on your list. Again, this is time, about 10 minutes per item, and keep going.

Write. Sketch the flesh. Now, go ahead and create descriptive sentences using the analogies and other thoughts you had. Go ahead and make us see and feel each and every element.

Now, take all the pieces you put together and put them into finished piece. Setting, action, characterization, plot… Put it all together. DRAW gives you a number of written sketches you can use as part of your writing.

mbarker.livejournal.com

Since I know you are waiting with bated breath . . .

According to Ms. Rogers, the answers are:

Analogy
Anaphora
Climax
Anaphora
Amplification
Analogy, onomatopoeia, alliteration, and similes
Amplification
Anaphora
Alliteration
Anaphora
Onomatopoeia
Anaphora and climax
Analogy

How did you do?

Current Mood: baited

mbarker.livejournal.com

Originally posted 21 March 2007

An exercise. You may remember the rhetorical devices. Anaphora, amplification, climax, analogy, onomatopoeia,and alliteration. These are the examples from Cindy Rogers' article, in somewhat random order. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to simply identify which of the six rhetorical devices each one represents or uses. Fair warning, one of the examples uses analogy, onomatopoeia, alliteration, and similes. So don't complain if you manage to find more than one rhetorical device in an example. Consider it a bonus! And with no further ado, here are the examples:

When this happened, they fought. Stinging flames of words blistered their tongues. Silence was worse. Beneath its slow-burning weight their black looks singed. After a few days, their minds shriveled into dead coals. Some speechless nights they lay together like lawbooks turned completely to ash.
Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assignment, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner.
We ran out of the house to the telephone box.
"Let's call the police as well," Jim said.
"And the ambulance."
"And Ernie Jenkins; he likes fire."
Nanapush cursed the moose, cursed himself, cursed the fishhooks, cursed the person who so carefully and sturdily constructed the boat that would not fall apart?
Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand to the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained and solitary as an oyster? he carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.
That's when I came to know that to be left, sent off, abandoned, was not of the moment, but a black ditch to the side of the road of your life, a sudden washout, a pothole that went down to China.
He wrote to the governor of North Dakota, to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. He wrote to the President of the United States and to county officials on every level. He wrote to Bernadette Morrissey and to the sick former land agent. He wrote to the state senators and representatives?
Davy smacked, swallowed, sank to yet more earnest sleep.
I lick the front page, which is all advertisements for films and dances in the city. I lick the headlines. I lick the great attacks of Patton and Montgomery in France and Germany. I lick the war in the Pacific. I lick the obituaries and the sad memorial poems, the sports pages, the market prices of eggs, butter and bacon. I suck the paper till there isn't a smidgen of grease.
but hearing Dad wrack and hawk and bits of his lung hitting whang in the pan.
A nine-year-old shouldn't be dragged from her house by someone who hates her.
Nor be forced to hear the language of the unloved.
Nor be jiggled in the laps of perverts.
A 9-year-old shouldn't be told, "We'll take you home now , but we'll be back.
We're right outside your window."
In this squeezed mass of children, I was a birch-bark scrap. I was floating downstream in a rolling current, twisting and spinning. Tipping. Dark water rushed up through the center of me and leaked out of my eyes.

There you go! Just match up the rhetorical devices with the examples. What could be simpler, right? (Yes, I will provide answers in a while - but try it without them, first!)

Cindy Rogers also includes two examples that she doesn't identify. Feel free to decide yourself what you think these use:

Tall as a boxcar, nailed up of laths spaced on oak posts, it leaned back in time.
Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls?

You may, of course, choose to rewrite any of these. Or use one as a cornerstone (initial spark? catalyst!) for something of your very own!

Write?

Current Mood: mix-n-match

mbarker.livejournal.com

Originally posted 20 March 2007

Making Your Writing Zing
a.k.a. rhetorical devices can be your friends

Cindy Rogers, in Writer's Digest July 2004, pages 43-45 with a little on page 60, talks about some rhetorical devices that you should know. Let's take a look, shall we?

Anaphora is simply repetition at the beginning. You can simply use the same word or words at the beginning of phrases, clauses, or sentences. Or you could simply stuff it in the middle, although strictly speaking that's not anaphora! Repetition makes the reader pay attention. (Although be careful - if you have ever read the begats in the Bible, you know it can also be a might boring if continued!)

Amplification is repeating, adding more detail, digging the ditch a little bit deeper. Amplification expands even as it clarifies. First you toot the horn once, then twice, then a long honk to see if anyone is listening.

And then there's climax. Climax involves arranging words or clauses or even whole sentences in ascending order of importance, for emphasis. Building a mountain for the reader to climb, step-by-step ascending, struggling upwards, until they reach the peak and see the grand scenario that you laid out for them

Analogy works by comparison. Metaphors say that one thing is another thing, without any hedging. Similes say it's like something else, putting a little bit of a hedge on the comparison. Analogies, sometimes without even mentioning the comparison, analogies extend and explain. They are often implied, and then run away with.

Onomatopoeia puts the sounds in the words. Sometimes you may have to make up some of the sounds, but there are a lot of words that have built-in sounds. Buzz, clang, slap, rattle, bang, screech, wheeze, fizz, zap, growl, roar, snap, crackle, and pop! Make those readers' ears ring!

Alliteration repeats consonants. When you read it out loud, you can hear the 's's or the 'm's or whatever. Slippery snakes slithering through the grass?

So there you have it -- or should I say six its? Anaphora, repeating the start. Amplification, internal repeating and expansion. Climax, going for the growth. Analogy, comparing apples and oranges -- but making it work! Onomatopoeia uses words that sound the way they mean. And last, alliteration, letting little letters link for lasting effects.

Got it? What the heck, you might want to try the exercise that Writers Digest suggests. Very simply they suggest taking a descriptive passage from something you're working on (or I'll add something you're reading) and then try applying each of these six techniques to that passage. Not all at the same time, but each one in turn, so that you write the paragraph or passage six times. Once with anaphora, once with amplification, once with climax, once with analogy, once with onomatopoeia, and once with alliteration. Mix and match - that's up to you!

And may the best rhetorical devices ornament your writing.

Current Mood: rhetorical

The Place For My Writers Notes

Entries tagged with analogy

EXERCISE: Wrap that analogy in romance!

TECH: Flesh It Out (Moldy Oldie!)

EXERCISE: Six Rhetorical Devices and 13 Examples? (Answers)

EXERCISE: Six Rhetorical Devices and 13 Examples?

TECH: Making Your Writing Zing

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