How to Use a Simile

A simile is the comparison of one entity to another to signal a resemblance between them. The comparison is accomplished by the used of ‘like’ or ‘as.’ Like a two-prong tuning fork husband and wife harmonized their skills. After eating the whole pie, she got as sick as a dog. The girl struggled like an eel, her teeth clenched on her lower lip (Fleming 42). In the last example, from Ian Fleming's Doctor No, the writer not only uses a simile, but also a nominative absolute ("teeth clenched"). Professional writers strive to combine both grammatical and rhetorical constructs. Oxymoron in Action IanFleming's Intransitive Verbs How to Use Similes What is an Allegory? StephenKing vs StephenieMeyer Updike: Use of Infinitives Possessive Nouns Using Zeugma for Humor HowToBegin Your Novel Truman Capote's Techniques How To Create Great Villains War on Adverbs Using Rhetorical Tools Ed McBain Sold 90 million books Hook Your Reader Dante and Writing Derrida and Writing Literature Transforms Us Senada Selmani, model To write great blogs, e-mails, term papers, essays, or fiction - Get Mary Duffy's Sentence Openers Itching to Become a Writer? Visit Mary Duffy's Storefront

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