Abstract
The present research examined patterns of metaphor production in autobiographical and nonautobiographical creative writing contexts by experienced and novice writers. Subjects wrote brief descriptions of feelings and actions related to intensely emotional experiences. Support was obtained for the hypothesis that more experienced writers would display consistent patterns of figurative language production while novice writers would dipper in their production of metaphorical language as a function of writing context. Support was also obtained for the generalizability of previous findings on verbal metaphor production to the writing domain—but only for novice writers.
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Portions of these data were reported at the 68th Annual Convention of the Western Psychological Association in Burlingame, California, April 28, 1988. The authors express their appreciation to Donald Ross who was most generous with his time, insights, and creative writing students.
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Williams-Whitney, D., Mio, J.S. & Whitney, P. Metaphor production in creative writing. J Psycholinguist Res 21, 497–509 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01067527
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01067527