Using Imagery

Aims:
- To recap the functions of metaphors,
similes and personification
- To look at the effect vivid image creates
in writing
 Starter

What is a What is a
METAPHOR ? SIMILE ?
Write a definition in your books Write a definition in your books

The night is a dark The night is like a

blanket covering the dark blanket
buildings. covering the sky.

Create a metaphor and a simile for…

1. Extreme heat
2. Extreme cold
3. Extreme loneliness
 Personification:
Can you remember what personification means?
Write a definition in your books.

• Fear knocked on the door.

• The very buildings themselves seemed to bow low as

the town's new hero approached.

What EFFECT do these examples create?

Using these images as a stimulus, write one sentence for each
image using EITHER a metaphor, simile or personification.

Now swap with a partner,

can they guess which
sentence describes which
image?
 Charles Dickens' Hard Times
Task 1:
Listen to the extract from Hard Times, draw any images or
symbols that are created from the description.
Which images stood out? Why?
Task 2:
Now, in pairs read and annotate the extract.
Try to find:
- An example of a simile
- An example of a metaphor
- Three POWERFUL words
Next to each example- write down what the EFFECT of this
imagery is.
Extension: can you find any other techniques that the writer
uses to create a clear picture of Coke Town? (Repetition
perhaps?)
[Coketown] was a town of red brick, or of brick that would
have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it but as
matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like
the painted face of a savage.
It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which
interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever
and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and
a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, arid vast piles of
building full of windows where there was a rattling and a
trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-
engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of
an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained
several large streets all very like one another, and many small
streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally
like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours,
with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the
same work, and to whom every day was the same as
yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of
the last and the next...'
 Plenary
• Write a description of your town using the
Hard Times extract as a model.

• ……… was a town of…