In my teaching, I very deliberately try to include at least one “memorable moment” in each class (that phrase, “memorable moments,” comes from the very engaging Harvard Professor of Computer Science, David Malan). These memorable moments include anecdotes, asides, digressions, personal revelations, jokes, songs, videos, and so forth: things that go against an academic classroom’s traditional conventions (lecture and discussion). These memorable moments are often the things that students remember most about my classes, but they’re not empty entertainment. Memorable moments are always metaphors or examples for the substantive knowledge or lesson that I’m trying to communicate to the class that day. That is, I try to come up with my memorable moments only after I’ve finalized the ideas I need to communicate for that day. Memorable moments are creative or unconventional ways of expressing knowledge that do not replace the communication of ideas; they enhance the communication of ideas by altering the style of communication to impart the substance of the idea in a different way. Students remember the metaphor or example, and the hope is that in remembering the creative way in which something was expressed they remember the content of the knowledge or lesson.

Be very deliberate about the memorable moments that you put into a paper. In every paper, even in every paragraph, find a way to say something that is so intense that your reader will not easily forget it, even years later. Fill your paper with memorable moments. It doesn't matter if it's an unexpected piece of evidence, a sentence that runs for 80 words, one that runs for three, a commonsense question, a break in style, a joke, a list of six possible readings of one line, polyptoton, a confession, a concession, a neologism, an analogy, a parenthetical, what have you – fill your paper with creativity and language that pops.

These memorable moments, however, are seasoning, not substance. Only include them if they make your substantive argument more clear, more emphatic, or more provocative. When writing instructors tell their students not to use creative writing in expository writing, it is because the creative writing usually enters into a paper at the expense of expository writing, which should be the focus of the paper. The majority of your paper should remain in a detached, analytical tone, it is true. Part of effective writing, however, is knowing when and how to buck conventions, specifically the conventions of academic writing.

Add in any rhetorical flourishes only after you have written the paper. Doing so will ensure that you're fitting your flourishes to your ideas, not your ideas to your flourishes.

Some techniques of figurative language to consider are: the metaphor, the anecdote, the ventriloquism, the joke, and the personal revelation.

Now, every high school English teacher in the history of the world has said that, when writing an essay, you should open with a “hook” that grabs your reader’s attention. But those hooks are almost always nauseating and obnoxious. If you include rhetorical flourishes – jokes, curveballs, anecdotes, metaphors, and so forth – consider using them in the body of your paper, where no one sees them coming, not the introduction or conclusion, where everyone expects them to be. Use figurative language to wake up your reader in the body of your paper while your introduction and conclusion remain in a detached, academic tone focused on your argument and its implications for serious scholarly inquiry.

Perhaps even more important than the effective use of rhetorical flourishes is the development of a writerly perspective. Students have sometimes come to me in the past saying that they feel they are making the same arguments no matter what the text may be. This can actually be a good thing, because it can point to the emergence of a perspective, and all good writing involves a perspective. If you don’t have a perspective, then why should we read you as opposed to the thousands of other writers out there?