Improving Style Through Diction, Part 11: Metaphor

To describe our world, we often use metaphor, which is a figure of speech directly applied to someone or something to show resemblance, although the association cannot be literal. We use metaphors in multiple ways:

• people with other people (My sister is the queen during our family's multi-city Zoom meetings.)
• people with animals (The boxer became a bull terrier as he slashed through the ring.) 
• people with things (Mother was the glue of our family.)
• things with other things (San Sebastian is the heaven of food.)
• places with other places (The platoon waded through hell in the rat-infested swamp.) 

Metaphors enliven not only fiction writing but our business correspondence. Instead of writing "Our company is at the top of the IT field," we might write "Our company stands atop the Everest of IT."