No matter if you're in school or well past your days in English class, figures of speech are used every day in our lives. From songs and television shows to conversations and advertisements, we often ...

What’s the most persuasive way to convey a message? Many writers say, “Tell a story!” Nothing hooks like narrative. I’ve said so myself. But research shows stories have a rival for hooking power: ...

The esteemed short-story writer Joy Williams wrote a book of short—and I mean really short—stories called Ninety-Nine Stories of God. The one called “Wet” is my favorite: The Lord was drinking some ...

For decades, debates about gender and science have often assumed that women are more likely than men to “leak” from the science and engineering pipeline after entering college. However, new research ...

Historically, metaphors and figurative language have been ignored as a serious topic of study in psychology and philosophy, exiled to the land of rhetoricians or literary analysts. In fact, even in ...

THE theater is the Lazarus of the arts. Two thousand years of “worst seasons ever” between Periclean Athens “and Elizabethan England failed to bury it. Indeed, in the two and a half millenniums since ...