List of Literary Techniques
Here is a list of literary techniques that can be used for essays and/or short answers. I know there are thousands of other techniques but I've just picked out the important ones which can be used for the HSC. Enjoy!
Allegory: A narrative that serves as an extended metaphor. Allegories are often written in the form of fables, parables, poems, stories and almost any other style or genre. The main purpose of an allegory is to tell a story that has both literal and figurative meanings.
Alliteration: The repetition of similar sounds, usually consonants, at the beginning of words. For example, Robert Frost’s poem “Out, out—” contains the alliterative phrase “sweet-scented stuff.”
Allusion: A reference within a literary work to a historical, literary, or biblical character, place, or event. For example, the title of William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury alludes to a line from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Assonance: The repetition of vowel sounds in a sequence of nearby words. For example, the line “The monster spoke in a low mellow tone” (from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Lotos-Eaters”) contains assonance in its repetition of the “o” sound.
Caricature: A description or characterization that exaggerates or distorts a character’s prominent features, usually for purposes of mockery. For example, a cartoon of a gaunt Abraham Lincoln with a giant top hat, a very scraggly beard, and sunken eyes could be considered a caricature.
Cliché: An expression, such as “turn over a new leaf,” that has been used and reused so many times that it has lost its expressive power.
Connotation: As association that comes along with a particular word. Connotations relate not to a word’s actual meaning, or denotation, but rather to the ideas or qualities that are implied by that word. For e.g. ‘gold’ – greed, luxury or avarice, or high value, such as in ‘worth her weight in gold’.
Contrast: When the difference between aspects within a text are emphasized to make a point.
Direct speech: Dialogue or extracts of conversation that are placed within a prose text.
Ellipses: A punctuation device that uses three full stops (…) at the end of a line to suggest a continuation of a thought or idea to create ambiguity.
Enjambment: The continuation of a sentence or clause over a line-break in poetry as to continue meaning and sense from one line to the next without pause.
Euphemism: The use of a word or phrase to replace another word or phrase that may be considered inappropriate or over-explicit in a particular context.
Epiphany: A sudden, powerful, and often spiritual or life changing realization that a character experiences in an otherwise ordinary moment. For example, the main character in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has an epiphany during a walk by the sea.
Figurative language: A type of language that varies from the norms of literal language, in which words mean exactly what they say. Figurative language does not mean exactly what it says, but instead forces the reader to make an imaginative leap in order to comprehend an author’s point. It usually involves a comparison between two things that may not, at first, seem to relate to one another. For e.g. simile, metaphor, symbolism, personification etc.
Flashback: A narrative technique that allows a writer to present past events during current events, in order to provide background for the current narration. By giving material that occurred prior the present event, the writer provides the reader with insight into a character’s motivation and/or the background to a conflict. This is done by various methods such as narration, dream sequences and memories.
Foreshadowing: An author’s deliberate use of hints or suggestions to give a preview of events or themes that do not develop until later in the narrative. Images such as a storm brewing or a crow landing on a fence post often foreshadow ominous developments in a story.
Hyperbole: An excessive overstatement or conscious exaggeration of fact. “I’ve told you that a million times already” is a hyperbolic statement.
Idiom: A common expression that has acquired a meaning that differs from its literal meaning, such as “It’s raining cats and dogs” or “That cost me an arm and a leg.”
Imagery: Language that brings to mind sensory impressions. For example, in the Odyssey, Homer creates a powerful image with his description of “rosy-fingered dawn.”
Intertextuality: the shaping of texts’ meanings by other texts. Most simply, any relationship between two texts such that the meaning of text is enriched by, or is even dependent upon, its relationship to the other text.
Irony: Broadly speaking, irony is a device that emphasizes the contrast between the way things are expected to be and the way they actually are. A historical example of irony might be the fact that people in medieval Europe believed bathing would harm them when in fact not bathing led to the unsanitary conditions that caused the bubonic plague.
Juxtaposition: When two images, objects or ideas are placed together for effect.
Metaphor: The comparison of one thing to another that does not use the terms “like” or “as.” A metaphor from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “Life is but a walking shadow.”
Motif: A recurring structure, contrast, or other device that develops a literary work’s major themes (see below). For example, shadows and darkness are a motif in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, a novel that contains many gloomy scenes and settings.
Narrative perspective (1st, 2nd or 3rd): A way that events of a story are conveyed to the reader, this is the ‘vantage’ point from which the narrative is passed from author to reader. The point of view can vary from work to work. An objective third point of view can be presented, where a ‘non-participant’ serves as the narrator and has no insight into the characters’ minds (pronouns – he, it, and they). The first person point of view occurs when the main character conveys the incident they encounter, as well as giving the reader insight into themself as he reveals his thoughts, feelings and intentions (pronoun I).
Onomatopoeia: The use of words like pop, hiss, or boing, in which the spoken sound resembles the actual sound.
Oxymoron: The association of two terms that seem to contradict each other, such as “same difference” or “wise fool.”
Paradox: A statement that seems contradictory on the surface but often expresses a deeper truth. One example is the line “All men destroy the things they love” from Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”
Personification: The use of human characteristics to describe animals, things, or ideas. Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” describes the city as “Stormy, husky, brawling / City of the Big Shoulders.”
Pun: A play on words that uses the similarity in sound between two words with distinctly different meanings. For example, the title of Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest is a pun on the word earnest, which means serious or sober, and the name “Ernest.”
Repetition: Use of a word, sound or phrase more than once in close proximity for effect or emphasis.
Rhetorical question: A question asked not to elicit an actual response but to make an impact or call attention to something. “Will the world ever see the end of war?” is an example of a rhetorical question.
Sarcasm: A form of verbal irony (see above) in which it is obvious from context and tone that the speaker means the opposite of what he or she says. Saying “That was graceful” when someone trips and falls is an example of sarcasm.
Satire: The use of language which holds up human weaknesses to ridicule. The satirist aims to tell us something that is wrong and often uses humour. In satire, humour is used to criticize.
Simile: A comparison of two things through the use of the words like or as. The title of Robert Burns’s poem “My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose” is a simile.
Symbol: An object, character, figure, place, or color used to represent an abstract idea or concept. For example, the two roads in Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” symbolize the choice between two paths in life.
Theme: A fundamental, universal idea explored in a literary work. The struggle to achieve the American Dream, for example, is a common theme in 20th-century American literature.
Thesis: The central argument that an author makes in a work. For example, the thesis of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is that Chicago meat packing plants subject poor immigrants to horrible and unjust working conditions, and that the government must do something to address the problem.
Tone: The general atmosphere created in a story, or the author’s or narrator’s attitude toward the story or the subject. For example, the tone of the Declaration of Independence is determined and confident.
Vector: Paths of reading in a visual text; lines along which our eyes are drawn.
