As I read through “See Through Words” by Michael Erard, I felt like my view of metaphors differed a lot compared to the author’s, as it should; I do not work as a metaphor designer. Overall, I felt like Erard’s view on writing metaphors dragged on, and for me I felt like it took away from the metaphors. That’s why I choose to expand my thoughts on the line “Maybe the best metaphor needs no furniture.” In the passage Erard describe furniture as a way to create a scene using your metaphor that allows the reader to see the entire picture instead of just a small portion, and how adding furniture or details helps to expand this view. I personally feel that the best metaphors are the ones with no furniture. I prefer a metaphor that is simple with big meaning, and I feel a metaphor is most impactful when it is simple enough that everyone would be able to understand and pull away their own meaning from it. I believe this is what makes metaphors so powerful because it allows people to see the thing that the metaphor is explaining in a different way; how they choose to perceive it. I think that by making a metaphor so that the reader has to have a fixed view of that thing really takes away from the point of what a metaphor is, that is to provide clarity or show similarities between two ideas.

Another thought I wanted expand on was Erard’s sentence regarding Tom Boyces metaphor comparing to children and flowers. Erard wrote “It was thought to be conventionally successful. But it had never been tested with users.” I feel that a good metaphor should stand on it’s own and it should be powerful and invite individuals to come up with their own thought and form their own connections. I think that testing a metaphor with users to gain a desired response to that metaphor takes away for the purpose and the overall power behind such a metaphor. I believe that metaphors provide the reader with a greater understanding and view of an idea and are a large part of our everyday language.