How to Make Comparisons

An author will often compare two things that are not similar. Right here we see this sentence that says, “Joseph ran like a deer.” The sentence is comparing Joseph to a deer. Are Joseph and deer are similar? No, not at all. They’re much different. Joseph is a human and a deer is an animal.

The reason these two things are compared to each other, the reason Joseph is compared to the deer, is to tell how Joseph ran. Right here it says that Joseph ran like a deer. How does a deer run? If you’ve ever seen a deer run, you’ve probably noticed that it’s very fast and it’s also very graceful.

If you’ve ever seen a deer running and it encounters a fence, it doesn’t go around the fence, it just leaps over the fence. It’s very graceful and it’s fun to watch it run. The sentence is saying that Joseph runs like a deer, which means Joseph runs fast and he runs gracefully. That’s why this comparison here is made.

It’s to help you better understand how Joseph runs. In this case, the author used “like” to compare Joseph to the deer. Joseph ran “like” a deer. The sentence could also say, “Joseph ran as a deer.” Sometimes, those words aren’t used. Look at this example: “Books are an ocean of information.”

Here, we don’t see the word “like” and we don’t see the word “as”, but here books are compared to an ocean. Here it was saying that Joseph is like a deer. He’s similar to a deer. In this case, it’s saying that books are an ocean. We know the author doesn’t actually mean that books are the ocean, because books aren’t an ocean.

When you think of an ocean, what do you think of? Large. That’s pretty much the main thing you think of when you think of an ocean. It’s just huge. The reason this comparison here is made is to show you that books have lots of information. They have a large amount of information.

If you look at an ocean, it just goes on and on forever. Well, that’s what this sentence is trying to say. The information in books just goes on and on and on. All the things you can learn from a book just go on and on forever. Comparison helps the reader to understand the similarities between two different words.