 Simile is a branch of metaphor so I recommend you start with the Oregon State video on metaphor if you haven't already watched it. As you know from the metaphor video, metaphors compare two things that have qualities in common. If I say that guy is a tool, I don't mean that he is an actual wrench or hammer or screwdriver. What I mean is that that guy is working within the system rather than thinking for himself. Simile in essence is a metaphor that is really easy to identify because it calls attention to itself. It does that typically by using the words like or as. From my point of view a good working definition of Simile stresses its level of identifiability. Unlike the more general category of metaphor, the author of a Simile explicitly directs us to compare the things. This technique occurs all the time in Stephen Crane's story The Open Boat. It's loaded with similes one or more on every page. Here are some examples. The waves on the ocean seemed thrust up in points like rocks. The ocean's foam was like tumbling snow. Matts of seaweed rolled over the waves with movement like carpets on a line in a gale. Once the castaways reach the shore one of them falls to the sand with a thud as if he had been dropped from a roof. Notice how in all these cases Crane forces us to see the metaphorical comparison. While it's a little too easy to say that similes will always use the word like or as, those words call attention to the comparison in a way much more explicit than a metaphor. Why does it matter that Crane uses so many similes? This is a story apparently about the impersonality of the ocean. About how nature is indifferent to the fate of the men who are trying to row a boat from the scene of their shipwreck to shore. They row through miles of cold and inhospitable ocean. But the story is as much about their human warmth for each other. How they bond together in the little boat over the course of this harrowing experience. Similes are a way that meaning too is made, not found in the world out there. They capture how meaning is generated by human activities of mind. By suffusing the story with similes, Crane pulls it back from being a nihilistic portrayal of cold, hard, impersonal, and literal reality. The many similes give even a story apparently about nature's indifference to humans, a level of humanity, of meaning making that is summed up in the story's final line. The men who survive Crane writes feel that they can now serve as interpreters of the ocean's power and force.