Personification

Personification: What Is It?

Personification is a rhetorical device where a speaker speaks as another person or object (in a style known as prosopopoeia). It can also refer to the assignment of human characteristics and qualities to non-human animals, inanimate objects or abstract ideas. A simple way to think about personification is to consider the characters of some of your favorite Saturday morning cartoons: Donald Duck, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. As a form of hyperbole, we know these animals can't speak English, go on madcap adventures in Disney World or use martial arts to right crime. But their personification makes them more human to us.

Why Use It?

In addition to being an artful form of speaking, personification can be used to more vividly make your point. Personification is a way of using storytelling to craft your speech by personifying complex or abstract ideas or thoughts. Your audience may better understand a complex subject when you give it human qualities and characteristics.

How to Use Personification

There are two ways to approach personification: to speak as another person to make a point or to personify an inanimate object, animal or abstract thought. In the former case, when you speak as someone or something else, your audience will project their reaction on that which you're trying to be and not on you as the speaker. This is helpful to deflect negative response to the words you're saying, but because you're saying them as someone else, the audience is less likely to blame you for your words.

An example of speaking as something else is when President Abraham Lincoln constructs a mock debate between Republicans and the South, emerging as the spokesman for the Republican party:

"You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny it; and what is your proof? Harper's Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper's Ferry enterprise. If any member of our party is guilty in that matter, you know it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcusable for not designating the man and proving the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcusable for asserting it, and especially for persisting in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the proof. You need to be told that persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true, is simply malicious slander." - Abraham Lincoln, Cooper Union Address

In the second instance, assigning human qualities to an object or idea also helps deflect negativity while bolstering the strength of your words and ideas. A particularly stark example of this could be seen at the 2012 Republican National Convention, when actor Clint Eastwood physically addressed and spoke to an empty chair representing President Barack Obama as if he were sitting there:

"So I — so I’ve got Mr. Obama sitting here. And he’s — I was going to ask him a couple of questions. So, Mr. President, how do you handle promises that you have made when you were running for election, and how do you handle them?" - Clint Eastwood, Republican National Convention speech