Visual metaphor

Borrows a familiar object as the container for your structure, so its shape does the explaining and carries claims of its own.

You have two numbers about your pickleball year. Two hours of match play a week, and 38 hours of drilling that nobody watches. Written as a sentence, the numbers slide past a friend without landing. Drawn as an iceberg, with the match hours as the tip and the drilling as the mass under the waterline, the same two numbers stop them mid-sentence. Nothing about the counts changed. You borrowed an object, and the object did the work.

Visual metaphor is that borrowing. You take a structure you already have, a proportion, a sequence, a dependency, and you pour it into an object the reader has been looking at since childhood. The iceberg, the bridge, the lever, the tree, the wall. The object arrives already understood, so the reader spends no effort learning the shape and all of it on your content. That is the benefit, and it is a real one.

The cost arrives in the same gesture. Every borrowed object carries relations of its own, and the reader gets those free whether you meant them or not. An iceberg's hidden mass holds the tip up, so your drilling now looks like a foundation. A bridge implies someone engineered it and it holds. A tree implies the roots came first and growth runs one way. A lever implies a ratio set by the bar. None of that was in your two counts.

So the discipline is not hunting for a prettier object. It is writing two lists before you draw: the relations you want the object to carry, and the relations it will carry anyway. The second list is the one that matters. If it is short and harmless, draw. If one item on it is a claim you would not defend in a plain sentence, either pick a different object or mark the break on the drawing itself, where the reader can see it.