Finding figures of speech

Students learn about figures of speech in French lessons, so that they can use them in their writing as well as in their reading comprehension. However, they often have difficulty identifying and analyzing them in a work. This episode of "Un cours en cinq minutes" is designed to help them.

The idea is to identify this type of phrasing in a text by seeing if there are sentences that say something differently, which could have been simplified. Example: "He had to cross the white sea that caressed his knees. The author could have said that he had to walk through the thick fallen snow. By using the image of the sea, the writer is probably trying to show that the character has the impression of being caught in the heart of an immensity.

Analogies and metaphors generally serve to provide a point of view on a situation. Meanwhile, the more sonorous figures play on consonants and vowels to create an image. Racine's classic line is famous for this: "For whom are these serpents that hiss on your heads?" Here, the repeated "s" recalls the hissing of snakes. So that's the state of mind to get into when trying to find figures of speech in a text: what's the author trying to convey?

Running time: 5min46

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