This post covers basics of idioms: their origin, their importance in communication, and more. What’s an idiom? A non-native speaker of English who is new to idioms hears this: “I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.” How will she…

Proverbs and sayings are popular nuggets of wisdom, often in circulation for centuries and even millenniums. This post contains proverbs and sayings on life, divided into ten categories (A to J). If you’re looking for more proverbs and sayings, you…

Proverbs and sayings are popular nuggets of wisdom, often in circulation for centuries and even millenniums. This post contains more than 25 proverbs on books. If you’re looking for more proverbs and sayings, you can find plenty of them in…

Personification is a figure of speech that gives human characteristics to non-humans (plants, animals, and inanimate objects) and abstractions (sadness, anger, etc.) to create striking visual images for the readers. It makes your writing livelier and concrete. Few examples of…

People sometimes confuse between metaphor, simile, and analogy. After all, all three compare two unlike things and help us see things in new ways. Here is an example: On the dance floor, he was a popcorn in the machine. [Metaphor]…

A metaphor is a figure of speech of comparison which says that two unlike things are one and the same. The most common, and the easiest, way to write a metaphor is to equate the two things through a be…

Simile is a figure of speech of comparison that compares two unlike things and says that one thing is like another thing. You’ll often find a comparison word such as like or as in a simile. Examples: The grass glittered…

Parallelism in sentences means putting two or more similarly-placed (or equal) elements in the same grammatical form. These elements can be words, phrases, or entire clauses. This post contains several examples of sentences with parallel structure, many of which have…

An onomatopoeia is a figurative language (and within that a device of sound) that uses word whose pronunciation imitates or suggests the sound the word describes. It makes your writing expressive through use of sound of words. In this post,…

Figurative language makes writing – and even speaking – more expressive and easier to understand. When done well, it lends style to your writing. More resources on figurative language: (Note that key parts of each figure of speech have been…

An alliteration, like onomatopoeia, is figurative language (and within that a device of sound) that focuses on sounds of words to make writing expressive and memorable. In alliteration, two or more consecutive words start with the same consonant sound. Same…