Analogies & Examples

There is a general belief that the human mind is a computing machine. If you supply it with facts and logical arguments, new concepts can be learnt. Indeed they can but this is hard work. Asking an audience to slog through raw theory places huge demands on short-term working memory. If however you use an analogy with something already familiar to the audience, a lot of this effort can be short-cut.

It is not so easy to know what knowledge looks like, so rather than trying to construct knowledge from first principles, it’s easier to compare what you are trying to explain with something the audience already knows. Most people find electricity difficult to understand, but by drawing the analogy between the flow of electric current and the flow of water, the abstract concept can be made real, and easier to grasp.

This kind of fast mapping is also harnessed by examples. A liberal sprinkling of examples in a presentation will bring your ideas to life. Examples make ideas real. Referring again to the electricity-water analogy, electricity is invisible and not usually something that people play around with first-hand. We come into contact with water, however, on a daily basis, and concepts of flowrate and water pressure are easily understood. This linking of ideas to the familiar is where examples come into their own. To further the discourse on electricity, references to the use of electricity around the home could prove helpful.

There has been much research carried out on the use of analogies, and these courses provide guidelines on when and how you should use examples and analogies. These tools are used frequently by politicians, lawyers, scientists, economists and historians. Similes and metaphors abound in literature, and yet presenters seldom think of using them when communicating.