Analogies are things or stories that partially resemble each other, and successful use of analogy helps you explain things by comparing them closely with things your audience already knows about. Let's suppose that you want to explain the quail's egg you ate at a Chinese restaurant. If you tell your friend that the quail's egg was about 1/3 the size of a hen's egg, and that it was a bit "moldy-tasting," you will have used two analogies to explain the quail's egg. You used a hen's eggs as an analogy for size, and you used mold as an analogy for the taste.

You can also help your readers understand your meaning if you use metaphors. These are figures of speech that liken one thing to another as if they were the same. Generally, when you use a metaphor, you imply that one thing is another. For example, we might say "He 's a pig" when referring to a man who eats too much, too fast, too noisily. He isn 't really a "pig," but he acts like one, and by associating him with the pig, you can give a mental image of the man and his eating habits.

Similes are also very useful in providing comparative images for your readers. A simile is a figure of speech in which one thing is explicitly compared to another by the use of "like" or "as." Keep in mind that a metaphor says one thing is another, but a simile says one thing is like another. You can provide images: the clouds are like horses' tails. You can allude to emotions: she was as angry as a tornado. And, most important, you can compare something your readers don 't understand and compare it with something they do in order to give them a clear path toward understanding your proposition.

Mullfoto of the Day

Along I-81. Uh, breaker, breaker ... Sir? Hello?

Catchy Caption of the Day

Acual Caption:

Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, left, and Britain's Prince Charles are seen whilst posing for a group photograph with Norway's Crown Prince Haakon and Crown Princess Mette-Marit, the Duke of Edinburgh and Queen Elizabeth II, and Norway's Queen Sonja and King Harald V.

Reminded me of that line from the "My Fair Lady" song "You Did It":

Although she may have studied with an expert dialectician and grammarian, I can tell that she was born ... Hungarian! Not only Hungarian, but of royal blood.

(AP Photo/Matt Dunham, Pool)