Milissa Tift
Wednesday Night
September 10, 2012
Professor Calabrese

Assignment #2
Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking – Assignment #2 In any story there are two types of language, figurative and literal. Language is, of course a necessary factor of any story. Without Language, an author could not tell the story. The author usually uses a combination of these two languages. Together, these languages characterize the author’s style. Literal language means exactly what is says, literal. It employs the primary meaning of a term or expression. It is actual, obvious, and free from exaggeration. An example of this would be: The girl baked the cake. Figurative language is imaginative, not literal. It
* “Lo, tis the east, and Juliet is the sun.” (Shakespeare) * The ship plows the seas. * “An aged man is but a paltry thing. A tattered coat upon a stick.” (W. B. Yeats) Although there are several types of figurative languages, the last one that I am going to talk about is clichés. A cliché can be a sign that we are too lazy to do our own thinking. In their original formulation, the thinking behind clichés was brilliant, but time and repetition have worn them into dull emptiness. A cliché is often a vivid depiction of an abstraction that relies upon analogy or exaggeration for effect, often drawn from everyday experience. Used sparingly, they may succeed. However, cliché in writing or speech is generally considered a mark of inexperience or unoriginality. A few examples of clichés are as follows: * Make hay while the sun shines. * Nothing new under the sun. * Sunday driver. * Once in a blue moon. * Cow jumped over the moon
When a writer uses clichés too often in their writing or in a story, he could begin to lose his audience because it is such a lazy way of writing. It is very unoriginal and the reader could become bored. A reviewer would give a poor review on an article that was full of clichés. Again, it is frowned down on because of it being a lazy and unimaginative type of figurative writing.

References: Thinking An Interdisciplinary Approach to Critical and Creative Thought
Fourth Edition Gary R. Kirby, Jeffery