The present paper is an empirical linguistic study which aims at elucidating the use of metonymy and metaphor in descriptive essays written by a group of intermediate EFL students (fenceforth: participants). For the purpose of the study, 20 participants were recruited from Stockholm University, Sweden and matched with a control group of 20 advanced EFL students from the same university. Both the participants and their respective controls were given five pictorial stimuli containing famous architectural landmarks in Sweden, after which both groups were instructed to write a one-paragraph descriptive essay about each pictorial stimulus using either i) an imaginary and creative approach or ii) a non-imaginary and purely descriptive approach. Next, the corpus of all the essays was analysed with the use of the computer program WordSmith (Scott, 1996). Quantitative analysis carried our in the program provided descriptive statistics involving word frequencies. The next step was a manual analysis of the corpus to indicate the presence of metaphor and metonymy. It was proved that that the use of metonymy tends to be associated with the intermediate level of EFL writing, while both metonymy and metaphor are predominantly found in the writing by advanced EFL learners, which supports previous research (MacArthur, 2010; Haghshenas & Hashemian, 2016).