Over the weekend, while at a campground in Virginia Beach, a funny thing happened to me.

Composing a text to one of my daughters, I recognized that describing my trip as “fun” or “cool” was generic and lazy. As I was in the South, I entertained the idea of employing one of the region’s well-known similes and metaphors. Sure enough, after she said she went boogie boarding, I said she sounded happy “as a pickle that has been dilled.”

Groan if you like! I found more clever sayings online.

A difficult predicament is “tougher than a $2 steak.”* A slow or dumb person has only “one oar in the water,” while an accomplished one “didn’t just fall off the turnip truck.” A nervous person acts like “a cat in a room full of rocking chairs” or, my favorite, “sweats like a whore in a church.”

Perhaps you think those homespun turns of phrase are dim-witted or silly. I found them witty and charming. There’s an art to them. After thinking the matter over, I will add a new description: powerful.

The writer or speaker, instead of using a dry adjective such as “amazing” or “awesome,” referred to an object, and not in a cliched or trite way. His or her words were clear and distinct. They aided thought, as exercise does in boosting brainpower.

 Tougher than a $2 Steak

 Alas, few writers and speakers use turns-of-phrase well.

That’s not just my opinion but the rough consensus in the magazine world about analogies, a close cousin of similes and metaphors. Conservatives complain inapt historical analogies have begotten bad policies, while independents and progressives criticize commonplace Covid-19 analogies for Americans’ response to the pandemic.

It’s tempting to assume inartful turns of phrase are the by-product of our digital age, but the predicament is an old one. George Orwell complained about the same problem in the pre-television era.

As we live in a mass-technology era, it’s no use pining for more sophisticated, literate cultures than our own, such as Shakespeare’s. We should adopt an Aristotelian if individualistic mindset.

Like Composing a Lyric

Writing an apt, original phrase is, as the blogger and author Scott Young notes, a creative act. It’s comparable to composing a line of verse or a song lyric. You have to do three things:

1. Find unexpected similarities in unlike things. In the film The Big Short, the late chef Anthony Bourdain compared collateralized debt obligations to two-day-old fish. The simile illustrates the latter’s cheapness and disposableness.

2. Marry familiarity with representativeness. This echoes the first point but with a proviso: the turn of phrase must represent an object or person accurately.

If not, analogies, especially, can be false or partial. While some expansionist dictators have shared similarities with Hitler and Stalin, comparing them distorts more than it illuminates.

3. Make the abstract concrete. A strong turn of phrase can be dropped on your foot, as writer John Maguire notes. It doesn’t have to hurt, though. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald compared the last bits of sunshine falling on Daisy’s face to “children leaving a pleasant street at dusk,” a simile that emphasized her beauty as both had “lingering regret” at their departure.

I don’t mean to suggest coming up with a strong turn-of-phrase is a daunting task. It is a teachable skill.

Two Steps to Writing a Fresh, Original Turn of Phrase

Being reflective strikes me as one essential step. Take childhood, for example. It’s a universal experience for readers, so drawing on your experiences and lessons connects with them.

Growing up, I watched, played, and read about baseball religiously, so Major League Baseball became my default reference point. A trailblazer was the Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson of his or her field, while a top performer was the Babe Ruth or Henry Aaron.

Baseball knowledge has wider applications, too.

While sports and military metaphors can be over-used, I use them to help grasp complex financial transactions. For example, special purpose acquisition companies, a hot financial trend, can be compared to a big-league owner forming a shell company to buy another sports franchise and having two years to do so.

Recording ideas in a journal strikes me as another key step to composing original turns of phrase.

Ideas for turns of phrase pop into your head on occasion, and you should be ready to write them down. Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards said he heard the riff for “Can’t Get No Satisfaction” while asleep one night, woke up, and strummed it on his guitar and into a machine. As slapdash as this sounds, the incident Mr. Richards’ commitment to his art. He recognized he might forget the riff if he didn’t record it.

Separating the Proverbial Wheat from the Chaff

Those are only two steps. There may be others.

Regardless, writers should take similes, metaphors, and analogies seriously, as big-league hitters do in studying opposing pitchers. Using them well separates not only amateurs from professionals but also good pros to great ones. That George Orwell, Michael Lewis, and Scott Fitzgerald employed them well is no accident.

Strong turns of phrase are learning tools and tiny works of art. In a digital age and knowledge economy where writers compete more than ever, using analogies well helps you understand not only the world but also that of your readers.

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*Former CBS reporter and anchor Dan Rather, a native Texan, employed these analogies on occasion. The one that sticks in my mind was uttered deep into election night in 2000. So close was the presidential race between Al Gore and George W. Bush, Mr. Rather said, it was “tighter than a tick.”