An analogy essay can be funny, encouraging a reader to find the link between your two subjects and laughing at, and enjoying, the comparison. For example, a writer could compose an essay about how coffee shops are like bars for the morning. At a coffee shop people buy overly priced drinks at a bar, find a table or stand with the drink, make chit-chat, and perhaps exchange numbers or email addresses with other customers. Other people are more solitary at the coffee shop, sidling up along a wall with their coffee, avoiding people but listening to their conversations, much like a person who goes to a bar just for a night out, not to socialize. Coffee shops also have regulars, as do bars, who come back every day and order the same beverage. The essay can be funny and insightful: by comparing coffee shops with bars, we learn about our culture, our taste for crowded places and our preference for imbibing stimulating or depressive drinks.
Almost all analogy essays are exaggerated in some way, pointing out similarities between things that are far-fetched or not likely. Some analogies are more exaggerated than others, however. For example, a student may write about schools as prisons. While there may be truth to that in some cases where abuse or neglect infect schools, for the most part schools are only prisonlike in exaggerated ways. For example, students, like prisoners, are "shut in," trapped in small rooms like cells, and allowed out only when a teacher, like a prison guard, grants permission. Students scribble and carve on desks, as do prisoners who carve names and numbers of days on their cell walls. Children are let out for recess, as are prisoners who are released from their cells for daily exercise. This kind of analogy essay opens up peoples' eyes only in an exaggerated way, however, not in a way that would make schools change policies.
Love is an art. In a book called "The Art of Loving," by Erich Fromm, the author makes the analogy that finding and sustaining love is like creative work. Fromm regards love as a project, one that is always a work-in-progress, a project that continually, if given devotion and care, grows more beautiful and rewarding, though at times very difficult, as time goes on. As with a painter creating a large, intricate landscape scene, two lovers need to put time, energy, creativity, care and finesse into creating their work of art. An analogy essay that combines two processes, in this case comparing love to art, is often insightful.
Take food as fuel for an example of a helpful essay. When an analogy is apt enough, it helps us live our lives. Writing an analogy essay about food as fuel helps a person appreciate that, while our bodies usually tell us we are in need of nutrients through hunger, sometimes we lose track of time or do not have an appetite. While it is OK not to nourish ourselves in some instances, not having "fuel" puts strains on the body, as driving on empty strains a vehicle. Apt and helpful essays extend an analogy into a useful guide, in this example for paying more attention to our bodies.