Simile - Makes a direct comparison between two dissimilar objects, always using connective words as "like, "as", or "as if". For example, research "is like" a treasure hunt!

Metaphor - Assumes an identity between two things. For example, "research is a treasure hunt". Or, "The software market is a jungle". Or, “It’s a Bull market”.

Analogy - An expansion of a simile or metaphor. When Maxine Singer, a biologist in the field of genetics appeared on Bill Moyer’s World of Ideas, she said:

“I’m interested in human genetics and in aspects of the structure of the human DNA, what we call the human genome. The best way to look at it is that a gene is like a sentence in an encyclopaedia. It’s a piece of information, and it’s buried in the genome, the whole encyclopaedia, which is a vast store of information.

The gene instructs the cell how to do some one thing, and all together the billions of cells in your body do all the things that make you who you are, that make a corn plant what it is, that makes a yeast cell what it is.

It turns out that there’s a lot of DNA that doesn’t really have any information, at least as far as we know now. It’s as though you had an encyclopaedia and on every third page, there was a lot of jabberwocky. And two pages later, there it is again. It doesn’t look like a meaningful sentence.

I can’t figure out what it is, and I’m certainly confounded by the fact that it occurs so many times.”

(Maxine Singer appearing on Bill Moyer’s World of Ideas (#138). Quoted from Technically Speaking, Jan D’Arcy p.13)

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