Due this week

General Writing. Send in your best work – poems, short stories, essays. (Feel free to do it throughout the year, but this gives you a deadline.)
Deadline: Oct. 10.

To submit to Newspaper Series

  • Log in. (Click "Not a YWP member?" to create an account.)

  • Click "create content" and create an ENTRY
  • Fill out "title," "author name, school & grade" and "prompt" boxes.
  • Paste story into "body."
  • Click "Submit." You are done.
    NOTES: Your account email must be accurate; a "blog" entry must be resubmitted as an ENTRY to be considered.

Breathing life into words - finding the metaphor

Submitted by aanderson on June 26, 2007 - 12:55.

Excerpted and edited from a 2005 YWP article
By Dorienne Cedeno
Teacher, People's Academy

"The greatest thing in style is to have a command of metaphor." - Aristotle

Natalie Goldberg offers this antidote for bland - or pretentious - writing: "show don't tell." This is an old adage that I have found hard to explain until I combined it with Peter Elbow's advice on metaphor. In his book "Writing With Power," Elbow explains that: "every metaphor is a force-fit, a mistake, a putting together of things that don't normally or literally belong together. A good metaphor in poetry or any kind of writing is also somehow graceful and just right."

The metaphor, then, becomes a way to think about language, to show rather than tell, to have fun.

Creating Metaphor

Generate a list of emotions or abstract nouns and write them down. Take a few minutes to look at the nouns and come up with your own comparisons to help explain these emotions or ideas. These metaphors can be used in your writing to make the language richer and more descriptive.

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