"Avoid metaphor and metonymy if you want to write clearly and effectively" Discuss, using examples from recent texts to illustrate your answer.

The first 200 words of this essay...

Written Discourse Analysis, ELF 601

Assessed Assignment 3:

"Avoid metaphor and metonymy if you want to write clearly and effectively."

Discuss, using examples from recent texts to illustrate your answer.

Word count: 2032

The use of metaphor, either verbally, or in written discourse, to describe scenes & explain events in the world around us is very common, its use enables us to understand & experience one type of thing within the conditions & terms of another, whereas metonymy is the use of one entity to refer to another that is related to it, & includes 'synecdoche' where the part stands for the whole, Lakoff & Johnson, (1980:36).

According to Lakoff & Johnson, (1980: ix) metaphor is ever-present, in language, as well as thought & action. They, along with Pinker, (1997: 352 et seq) perceive human thought processes to be metaphorical in nature; Pinker also suggests that some metaphorical concepts have grown to be so common, across the whole range of speech acts & other events that we experience, that they are no longer recognisable to the layman as metaphorical expressions, so entrenched within our everyday language use have they become. According to