Geez, look at all of those metaphors!

Until last week, it was an open question which of these visions of McCain bore a closer relation to reality. But with the weeklong string of attacks uncorked by the Arizona senator and his people during Obama’s trip abroad and in its aftermath—some brutal, some mocking, but all personal and focused on Obama’s character—we now have an inkling of just how deep in the mud McCain and his people are willing to wallow in order to win in November: right up to their Republican eyeballs.

Thanks to some ambitious punctuation, the second sentence boasts at least 7 metaphors. 8 if you don’t count “deep in the mud” and “wallow” as the same image. The metaphor is such an important hub for our cognitive functions that its evil twin, the mixed metaphor, turns its head at every turn, often leading to stylistic train wrecks, especially in journalism.

After all, in fiction, a good editor will belittle a writer for mixing his metaphors. “Ha ha! McCain uncorked a string? Since when do you bottle string?” A journalist, however, recognizes the necessary lubrication a metaphor provides. The Economist Style Guide has an entire section dedicated to the metaphor, and it is telling that the writer acknowledges, but does not condemn, the overuse of tired phrases. The Economist’s advice is, simply, to be aware of what you’re saying, so you don’t drop a doozy like “This is an off-the-wall programme with a track record of cutting-edge humour, but on this occasion we appear to have overstepped the mark.”

Be precise! Or, as Zapp Branigan would say, “If we can hit this bullseye, all the dominos will fall like a house of cards…checkmate!”

You can’t heap blame the poor writer, though. Steven Pinker writes extensively about the role of metaphors in thought. If you find yourself delighted by cognitive linguistics, I highly recommend Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought. He spends hundreds of pages putting language under the microscope, examining it as every writer should: as a window to the mind’s machinery.

As for metaphors, it all boils down to one thing. Take them with a grain of salt.

When you nail a point, it’s the same as when you hit the nail on the head? Both imply precision, even though nailing a picture to the wall is much different than squarely hitting a nail once. Congrats on not hitting your thumb, I guess.

Then you can hammer something. If you nail a question, you got it right without difficulty. If you hammer your point home, you engaged in rhetorical brutality, pushing your position over and over until you succeeded. But how often do you use a hammer without a nail? Shouldn’t their respective metaphors be the same?

If a baseball player nailed the ball, the phrase implies he swung the bat accurately and skillfully. If he hammered the ball, he struck it with a powerful swing.

It goes to show how two tools that work together for a single purpose (to attach one thing to another thing) can take on different connotations. Once that divide occurs, the metaphors begin to diverge even further. After all, what would you think if someone said, “Man, I got so nailed last night, and then I hammered this chick?”

“Show, don’t tell.”

At first pass, it’s the solution to 90% of bad writing. It’s such a vague, catch-all instruction that if you’re in a writer’s workshop, you can prove you critiqued your peers by writing “show, don’t tell!” all over their stories. Strident red letters work best. I prefer to replace the “don’t” with “not,” so I can refer to the phrase as SnotT. That acronym should tell you how highly I regard the overused criticism.

“Show, don’t tell” is shorthand for Immerse your reader in the story through detail. Turn your nouns, adjectives and verbs into people, emotions and actions. In Science Fiction, a particularly good piece of SnotT is called an eye kick, referring to vivid imagery that shocks the reader with just how futuristic the future is.

SnotT is absolutely necessary, and you should forget it exists.

In fact, you should forget it for the exact reason it’s necessary. SnotT is a shortcut, just as telling your reader “Bob was mad” is a shortcut. Learning about SnotT sparks off a series of epiphanies about what writing (any kind of writing) is actually about. Anyone can say “Bob was mad.” It takes a writer to make Bob act mad.

But you already know this. If you’ve taken a writing course, you’ve probably been chastised for telling. You’ve also probably suffered the consequences of overcompensation, and written lines like “Bob tightly gripped the railing, his fingers turning whiter than north pole snow, unable to control the violent synaptic explosions sending ricochets of profanity bouncing off the walls of his medulla oblongata.” That’s a bad way of saying, “Bob was pissed.”

SnotT will instantly improve your writing, but runs into diminishing returns. Eventually, in order to improve, you have to crack the rule open and examine the gears turning inside. Many writing “rules” are, at the core, variations of “show, don’t tell.” Take a few from ye olde Elements of Style:

• Avoid passive voice – “The ___ was ___ed by ___” is the tellingest way to tell something. “___ ___ed the ___” often forces you to come up with a better verb, or at least a description.
• Use definite, concrete language - Strunk compares “a period of unfavorable weather set in” with “it rained every day for a week.” The former is vague telling, the latter precise showing.
• Express coordinate ideas in similar form – “Blessed are the poor… Blessed are they that mourn… Blessed are the meek…” A cool example of showing by telling. Repetition and parallel construction clearly show the relationship between phrases.

Most matters of style reduce to a variation of “show, don’t tell.” A good journalist has plenty of background beyond just the facts, a good copywriter will translate the product’s features into benefits, and a good fiction writer will avoid info dumps. It all comes back to SnotT.