Similes, imagery, and punctuation bring a text to life and help it to be easily understood. Let’s start off with some definitions.

A simile is a comparison that uses the word “like” or “as.” Examples can be seen in the following:

“Her swimming stroke cut through the water like a gliding dolphin.”

“She was as beautiful as an angel.”

Imagery, in a nutshell, is descriptive language that allows a picture to be created in the mind of the reader by evoking the senses. For example, instead of saying “the sun was setting as she walked home through the field,” a writer could use imagery and say “the fading rays of the sun shone on her face as strolled toward home through the field of wheat.”

Punctuation helps form the building blocks of sentences. Popular punctuation marks include periods, commas, exclamation points, and question marks.

The effect of using similes and imagery in a text is that they will make your text more interesting and engaging to readers. Depending on what kind of text you are writing, this can be very valuable. For example, if you are writing fiction, imagery and similes can help engage the reader by allowing them to get to know your protagonist better. In journalism, on the other hand, imagery and similes would generally be inappropriate.

The effect of using punctuation is that your text will make sense and be easy to read. Without punctuation, any text longer than a couple of lines would be impossible to understand.