As a result, I have become acutely aware of just how much our culture uses figurative language and of the importance of being able to rephrase it into explicit terms in my explanations. This one aspect alone has made my teaching job interesting and challenging. The greatest challenge is that I do not know what they will ask about next any more than I know just what figurative language I will use involuntarily next. For these reasons, I am quite impressed with the need to realize the place for and the importance of learning about metaphor and the most effective way to use it. Another point I would like to make about the advantage of using the metaphor as a heuristic, in addition to the ones claimed by Flower and Hayes, Hashimoto and my experience, is that it affords the composition teacher an opportunity to teach the application of an important part of grammar without lecturing about it.
Most students know what the book definition of grammar without lecturing about it.
Most students know what the book definition of metaphor is, but they do not know the subtlty of it, the complexity of it, or the dramatic effect it can add to rhetorical writing. Using an element of grammar for a heuristic for invention would have a two-fold teaching purpose in that the students would have more knowledge about the usefulness of metaphor, they would learn what it was, and they would learn how to use it effectively to say what they need to say clearly and interestingly. They would also learn a great deal about invention and the rhetorical process and about seeing their world from completely new perspectives. Due to the complexity of the metaphor, there is a great deal of detail which we could examine, but we could not relate those complexities to the undergraduate composition classroom very effectively. For now, however, we can be satisfied that we have defined and explicated metaphor as a heuristic for invention.