Description:  In academic essay writing requires students need to follow several instructions. One of them is to follow style. While working on writing style students often tend to use academic metaphors and analogy. However, due to the confusion students tends to interchange the both. Through this article, you will learn how to use metaphor and analogy in academic essay writing.

Academic writing can be a very tricky work. Students need to think from various aspects and keep of note of various constraints. Among all these constraints, one thing that they need to focus on is the writing style. While working on their academic essay, the students often confuse themselves with metaphor and analogies. They often query

“When and how should we use metaphor and analogy?”

If you have the same doubt, the first thing that you need to understand is the difference between the both. This will help you understand how to use them correctly.

What Is a Metaphor?

You use a metaphor when you need to convey an idea quickly. However, you do this with the help of a word that has a completely different meaning.

For instance, “good research is one of the basic pillars of a good thesis”. Here, a pillar is a structure that holds something. It signifies that a good research is one of the important elements of a good thesis.

What Is an Analogy?

An analogy helps in explaining or clarifying something with help of comparison between two things. The basic key of analogy is trait resemblance. The things you use to explain your topic must have some traits resembling your topic.

For instance, we can compare academic writing to cooking through the following analogy.

Cooking requires a chef to collect all the ingredients in advance. This helps the chef to avoid the search for the ingredients at a later stage. Similarly, you need to collect all your lecture notes before you start with your academic essay writing. This will help you avoid a hustle while writing. The above example uses the cooking analogy to explain the need for collecting the required notes and resources.

If you still don’t understand, you can get essay help in UK from an essay writing service. The companies that offer essay writing service in UK have experts who use metaphor and analogy properly.

What’s the Confusion?

Metaphors often help in communicating abstract ideas. However, most of the times, students use it in the wrong way. They make the metaphor as the base of their argument. For instance, assume the same example of the pillar. If you use the construction of pillar as an analogy to explain the research, it becomes a disaster. The below example will help you understand how a metaphor can be misused as an analogy.

A pillar is made of several elements and is an important part of any building. The importance of the pillar lies in the fact that it supports the entire building. If the building does not have the right support, it would fall causing a huge damage.

Similarly, the research comprises of several resources. The research is very important for the thesis because it provides necessary information for its support. If the right resources are not selected for the research, the thesis will become a disaster.

Here, the metaphor pillar is unnecessarily expanded and made into an analogy just to support the argument.On the other hand, students use analogy as a metaphor when they are unsure about the relevant traits. As a result, the analogy becomes a metaphor.

For instance, let us assume the same case of cooking. If you do not explain cooking properly, then it could be difficult to relate it to the prior collection of resources. The below example will help you understand how an analogy can be misused as a metaphor. Collecting the notes and resources before writing the essay is an art of cooking.

In the above example, the readers will never understand the relationship between cooking and collection of notes. The reason is that we have used them as a metaphor.

What Is the Solution to the Confusion?

Such confusion mostly occurs when the justification for your argument depends only on a metaphor or an analogy. To avoid the confusion, you should first check if your argument works without any metaphor or analogy. It should provide the complete message by itself. Sometimes you might not be able to express your argument without a metaphor or analogy. As a result, you end up misusing both the metaphor and analogy.

On the other hand, some of your argument might serve its purpose without any metaphor or analogy. In such cases, you can freely add any one of the both accordingly. Therefore, now that you know the difference between a metaphor and an analogy, you should ensure that you avoid repeating the issue. However, if you find it difficult you can seek essay help in UK from essay writing service in UK. One such service is Uniresearchers, which offers the best essay writing service to the students.