The metaphor is the use of a word or group of words in a figurative sense, rapprochement of two concepts on the basis of any given similarity between them. This reception is often used in fiction and in journalism to make stronger impression on the reader.
Instruction
1. To find a metaphor in the text, at first read the text entirely. Pay attention to style of the text. Art and publicistic texts will use a little different metaphors. In the scientific text of a metaphor most often are absent. The metaphor in the text of scientific contents sounds is inappropriate or allows to carry the text to journalism.
2. For a metaphor in fiction irrespective of whether the text belongs to prose or poetry, the term "poetic metaphor" is used. The poetic metaphor is seldom limited in a word or a phrase. More often it is the so-called "the developed metaphor" when any phenomenon of reality is described allegorically. For example, F.I. Tyutchev metaphorically describes a thunderstorm as follows: "… wind Geba, / Feeding Zevesov of an eagle, / the Gromokipyashchy cup from the sky, / Laughing, on the earth spilled". Such metaphors, most likely, will be evident already at the first reading.
3. Metaphors in the publicistic text will be shorter (though not always) and more transparently. For the author of such text important that each reader unambiguously understood what it is about that the text was read easily and to the reader it was not necessary to think for a long time of the meaning of a phrase (whereas the author of the art text sometimes pursues the aim opposite). In the Afisha magazine in Daniil Dugayev's article "Plus of the ordinary person" we meet the offer: "The next tribe is going to migrate from Facebook in Google+". The word "tribe" is used here metaphorically and replaces the concept "users of social networks". The metaphor in journalism often has estimated character.
4. Sometimes over time because of frequent use the metaphor ceases to be perceived by native speakers per se and turns into "the erased metaphor". Such phrases as "a chair leg", "a bottle neck", "a uvula of a boot" are the erased metaphors.
5. When it seems to you that you found a metaphor, check the guess, having tried to replace this word or a phrase with a word or a phrase with a direct sense, to paraphrase the offer so that it sounded not allegorically. If at you it turned out to make it – means, you really found a metaphor in the text.