You can help your readers make connections with transitions that help the reader move from one idea to another, or from a piece of evidence to a logical reason that proves your thesis is true. But you can also make those connections through the use of examples or images that help the reader associate what is not known to what is known or understood.

Analogies are things or stories that partially resemble each other, and successful use of analogy helps you explain things by comparing them closely with things your audience already knows about. Let's suppose that you want to explain the quail's egg you ate at a Chinese restaurant. If you tell your friend that the quail's egg was about 1/3 the size of a hen's egg, and that it was a bit "moldy-tasting," you will have used two analogies to explain the quail's egg. You used a hen's eggs as an analogy for size, and you used mold as an analogy for the taste.

You can also help your readers understand your meaning if you use metaphors. These are figures of speech that liken one thing to another as if they were the same. Generally, when you use a metaphor, you imply that one thing is another. For example, we might say "He 's a pig" when referring to a man who eats too much, too fast, too noisily. He isn 't really a "pig," but he acts like one, and by associating him with the pig, you can give a mental image of the man and his eating habits.

Beware the "mixed metaphor," however; these statements are very confusing. We might say "grab the bull by the horns" (an idiom for tackle the problem directly), but if we say "grab the cow by the horns" or "grab the bull by the hands" we have mixed the metaphor, which implies that a bull is like a problem.

Similes are also very useful in providing comparative images for your readers. A simile is a figure of speech in which one thing is explicitly compared to another by the use of "like" or "as." Keep in mind that a metaphor says one thing is another, but a simile says one thing is like another. You can provide images: the clouds are like horses' tails. You can allude to emotions: she was as angry as a tornado. And, most important, you can compare something your readers don 't understand and compare it with something they do in order to give them a clear path toward understanding your proposition.