Why personification is important

Personification works by making non-human objects more relatable to humans using vivid descriptions, feelings and emotions. Authors of all kinds of literature use personification, particularly those who write fictional works.

Personification is a literary tool that paints a vivid picture of landscapes, celestial objects and other natural wonders for readers. It is a figure of speech, which is a way for authors to add color and life to subjects and characters by emphasizing and clarifying characters and scenes, and adding dimension and color to characters and scenes.

Personification helps bring inanimate objects to life and makes them more appealing to audiences. They rowed her in across the rolling foam— The cruel, crawling foam. Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke. Scientists often argue that rendering scientific information in overly human terms is a surefire way to make it harder to learn science, particularly for impressionable children who apparently will believe anything you tell them.

Many assume personification just became a thing in language because of a tendency towards animism, a very unscientific belief that non-human entities such as animals, plants, mountains etc, have a spiritual life. Pascal Boyer shows otherwise, citing cognitive and experimental studies that suggest children, early on, know perfectly well what is animate and inanimate and in fact their world knowledge is not only complex, it also requires sophisticated theorizing about objects.

We all have a tendency to personify, whether we believe in gods or not. By personifying, we often assume social roles and identities for objects and attribute intentions and emotions to them.

This not only tells us a lot about our own cognitive states, it increases empathy and understanding. Privacy Policy Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message. A curious case of how deeply natural personification might be in cognition was examined over a hundred years ago, in the work of psychologist Mary Whiton Calkin and others.

Calkin ran experiments on what is now termed ordinal-linguistic personification, a variant of grapheme synesthesia pdf. More well-known forms of synesthesia are those based on color distinctions and other basic senses such as sound, touch and taste. Graphemes may often have a gender or social status in relation to other graphemes, or generate feelings of like or dislike, or have very elaborate back histories. B; seems like a young woman, a friend of L, which seems like a daughter to M.

N seems to be a sort of maiden aunt, sister to M. O is a young man connected with M as a nephew. He connects M and N with P, an older friend of his. Q is odd and stands by himself as rather an eccentric middle-aged man. Why do you use such phrases when it is well known that the breeze can't sing and the sky can't dance? Knowingly or unknowingly, you use it to add more depth and intensity to what you are saying. You use it to convey your emotions deeply to the other person.

This my dear readers is personification. Don't you want to use such imagery more often while communicating and while writing? Why wouldn't you?

After all, language is an art and one should know how to use that art in the best way possible. Personification is a literary device used to give life, to add vividness, and agility to the inanimate characters of the piece of writing. Personification is used for defining the scenic beauty, the natural wonders, inanimate subjects of importance in a literary work as a pet of the protagonist. It acts as a figure of speech to explain the characters, the scenes, and the time while the scene is played.

Sometimes the inanimate object is itself the protagonist. In such situations also, different types of personification are used to make the inanimate character come to life and feel emotions so that through that the reader also feels the emotions.

Literary works make an effect only when they can instil and stir emotions in the reader, and doing this is the purpose of personification. Some writings are more emotion and imagination-centric than others.

Fiction for example is a highly imaginative genre of literary work. The protagonists and the antagonists along with other characters have a life of their own as they are living objects but sometimes the writer wants to give life to inanimate objects to set the scene or to create the mood.

It is at such time that the literary tool of personification is used to define the characters, the objects, and the scene. See how these lines touched the chords of your heart? How they stirred the emotions in you? Fear, sadness, gloom could be felt in just a matter of moments. Personification creates a stir of emotions and gives life to otherwise lifeless objects. Poetry being a more emotive literary work, its whole plot is dependent on the tool of personification. The example of such personification is mentioned here.

Like while talking about a river, the glistening sounds of the river are described to make the reader feel the movement of the river. In the poem, 'road not taken', Robert Frost personifies road in the phrase, 'like it is grassy and wants to wear'. The words here imply as if the road was a human who could feel wear and tear. The winds, whispering, the water cutting the stones, the sun burning in anger, the hurricane being mad with fury, all of these are the effect of personification in poetry.

The effect of personification in poetry is not only to add more meaning and emotions but also to add more intensity, clarity, and drama. To understand the cause and effect of personification, we have to understand in detail what personification is. How did it come about and how to differentiate it from other similar literary devices.

In simple terms, a personification literary term compares things by picturing them as similar to each other as possible.