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Start giftingFarnsworth’s Classical English Metaphor
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Learn moreMake your writing and speech shine like the sun! Here’s the most entertaining and instructive book about enlivening and clarifying communication by comparing one thing to another.
Ward Farnsworth provides a wide-ranging, practical tour of metaphors, arranged by theme. He shows how the best writers have put figurative comparisons to distinctive use―for the sake of caricature, to make an abstract idea visible, to make a complicated idea simple.
Using hundreds of examples, Farnsworth demonstrates all the different stylistic ways that points can be unforgettably made. There are quotations from novelists, playwrights, philosophers, and orators—along with commentary on how and why they work to bring power to words both in person and and on paper.
Writers and speakers, this book will make you a star.
Ward Farnsworth is the author of books on law, philosophy, rhetoric, and chess and has published scholarly articles on the economic analysis of law, constitutional law, statutory interpretation, jurisprudence, and cognitive psychology.
John Lescault, a native of Massachusetts, is a graduate of the Catholic University of America. He lives in Washington, DC, where he works in theater.
Reviews
“His discerning analysis of classical style as wielded by some of the most inspiring writers in English: Jefferson, Lincoln, Churchill, Douglass, and many others.”
“I want this book to be beside my bed for years to come, a treasure-house of the liquid magic of words.”
“Ward Farnsworth is a witty commentator…It’s a book to dip in and savor.”
“Most people will find it a grab-bag of memorable quotations, an ideal browsing book for the nightstand.”
“A feat of elegant demystification…Farnsworth is able to focus on the finite material of metaphorical referents…a brilliant strategy, both in its utility for writers and the inherent insight Farnsworth’s divisions suggest about metaphors.”
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