English Tec - Literary Devices

Literary Devices - English Tecniques for students studing 2 Unit standard English in Australia

Accumulation

A gradual built-up of words, emotion and general anything

Allegory

A extened metaphor where objects, characters and events are used to represent abstract ideas or real - world issues. Some text include allegories as literary devices while other texts are allegories.

Different types inculde:
- social
- spirtual
- moral
- Politcal

Note: Allegories often mirror characters and events from real life to comment on them indirectly.

Allegory and metaphors: A metaphore works by comparing two obj. One is the Vehicle - the object creating the overall deeper meaning, and the other is the Tenor - the object being described, that already has meaning.

An allergory uses the narrative as the vehicle that carries the message, or idea, about the real world (tenor).

How to tell if a text has an Allegory in it or is an Allegory:
1. Ask “what is this narrative comparing”
2. See what the allegory makes reference to, whether this be a historical event, period, or ideology - this may require some contextual research before analysing the text.
3. Decipher what allegory is trying to say. - how does it comment on a period, idea or person?
4. Ask “How does this develop meaning in the text?” - how does the author try to change perpective on ideas being presented, and which theme/s does this allegory depict?

How to tell if a text has an Allegory or is an Allegory?

1. Ask “what is this narrative comparing”
2. See what the allegory makes reference to, whether this be a historical event, period, or ideology - this may require some contextual research before analysing the text.
3. Decipher what allegory is trying to say. - how does it comment on a period, idea or person?
4. Ask “How does this develop meaning in the text?” - how does the author try to change perpective on ideas being presented, and which theme/s does this allegory depict?

How does an allegory use metaphoric tec?

An allergory uses the narrative as the vehicle that carries the message, or idea, about the real world (tenor).

Alliteration

Repetition of a constant sound at the start of two or more words that are in close proximity to one another. Used commonly in poerty.
E.g. “Tyger, tyger, burning bright.” - William Blake poem

Allusion

A subtle or indirect reference to another thing, text, historical period, ore relgious belief.

Anadiplosis

A rhetorical device that involves the repetition of the final word or phrase of a clause or sentence at the beginning of the next. This technique builds rhythm, emphasis, and cohesion, often escalating emotional or thematic intensity.

Like a linguistic chain — each idea feeding into the next.

E.g. She opened the door to fear. Fear that crept through the walls. Walls that once held her safe.

Anaphora

Repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses, sentences, or lines to create emphasis, rhythm, and emotional resonance.

E.g. We will rise in the morning. We will rise with purpose. We will rise despite the odds. or “Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream…”

Effect:
- creates rhythm + emotional build up
- Unifies a passage or idea
- Emphasises persistence, obsession, struggle, or collective experience.

What are successive clauses:
Each clause is a unit or meaning (typically containing a subject and a verb) e.g. ‘I remember the night. I remember the sound. I remember the silence after. Each “I remember…” is a new clause, and they come one after the other, so they are successive.

What is a clause?

Each clause is a unit or meaning (typically containing a subject and a verb)

What is a successive clause?

Successive clauses = clauses that follow one another in sequence, usually within a sentence or paragraph.
e.g. ‘I remember the night. I remember the sound. I remember the silence after. Each “I remember…” is a new clause, and they come one after the other, so they are successive.

Epistrophe

Epistrophe is the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive clauses, sentences, or lines.
e.g. “She wanted more time. They asked for time. He begged for time.”
The word “time” is repeated at the end of each clause - that’s epistrophe.

Effect:

• adds weight to repeated idea

• creates rhythm with a tone of finality or obsesstion

• works well in persuasive writing, speeches, poetry
  

Anthropomorphism

The act or attributing human qualites to a non-human figure.
E.g. In Zootopia, animals talk, wear suits, have jobs = anthropomorphism.
If the non-human thing is behaving as a human would, it’s anthropomorphism.

Zoomorphism

Giving animal traits to humans, gods, or inanimate things.
e.g. “She snarled, ready to pounce.”

Personification

Abstract ideas or objects are metaphorically described as having human traits.
e.g.“The wind whispered through the trees.”
If it’s only being described in a human way (for poetic/metaphorical effect), it’s personification.

What is the difference between Personification and Anthropomorphism?

Personification is used in a light/metaphorical sence where objects, abstract ideas and nature are described as like a human. Commonly used in poetry or descriptive writing.
e.g. “The stars danced above. The moon smiled in silence.” - described with human characteristics

Anthropomorphism is used in a literal sences where animals and objects literally behave like humans. Commonly used in Fables, fanasy and and childrens stories.
e.g. “The rabbit sipped tea, adjusted his vest, and checked his golden watch.” - behaving like humans

“The city stretched awake beneath the rising sun, its streets yawning in golden silence.” is an example of?

Anthropomorphism

“The teacup giggled as it was filled, wiggling happily on its saucer.” is an example of

Personification

Anticlimax

Arrangement of words in order of decreasing importance
e.g. “He trained for years, climbed the highest peak, braved the storm… and found out the treasure was a plastic trophy.”

Antithesis

A type of Juxtaposition where opposing or contrasting ideas are placed in parallel grammatical stucture emphasing the contrast between them.

e.g. “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” — (Martin Luther King Jr.)

Note how the structure on both sides of the contrast is balanced (parallel clauses), and the ideas are polar opposites.

Oxymoron

A compressed form of juxtaposition that places two contradictory words (usually side by side) to reveal a paradox or complexity. It occurs at the word level, not sentence or clause level.
e.g.

“Deafening silence”
“Bittersweet”
“Living death”

Note: Unlike antithesis, oxymoron doesn’t rely on strtucture - it is about internal contradiction (meaning: two opposing or incompatible idead exist within the same unit) in a single phrase.

Assonance

Repetition of vowel sounds, which can occure anywhere in the word, not only at the start.
e.g. “she sells sea shells by the sea shore.:

Asyndeton

Asyndeton is a rhetorical device in which conjunctions (like and, but, or) are deliberately omitted between words, phrases, or clauses in a list or sequence.

Effect: adding dramatic or rhythmic effect.

• Speed, → can mimick rapid thought, action, and createemotional urgency.

• intensity → created by list items to seem starkly as there are no conjustions and enhaneces compresstion as idead are keeps tight, clean and forcefull.

• emotional force, as points presented in this manner seem to create a staccato tone, mimicing typical human reactions when it comes to stress, anger, or determination.
  

Useful in:

• speeches, poetry, or intense inner monologue.

Example:
“I came, I saw, I conquered.” — (Julius Caesar)
“He ran, jumped, fell, bled.”

Climax

The highest point of intensity. The arranging of idea in ascending order of importance so that the most important or striking idea comes last.

Colloquail language (or colloquialisms)

Informal everyday language, used in everyday conversations.
e.g.“Can’t be stuffed doing that today.”
Effect: It is an Aus. idiom meaning ‘I can’t be bothered’ showing the emotional tone of the character, setting regional context and creating relaiblity and realism for the reader.

Effect: creates realism

• Authentic voice

• Realistic characters

• Specific social, regional, or cultural context

• Tone (casual, humorous, relatable)

Ellipsis

… to show pause in a sentence

Enjambment

Sentences that flow into eachother without any full stops, commas, or grammatical pause.

Effect: flow, suspence or urgency

Ethos

Ethos (literary/cultural): The shared values, beliefs, and spirit of a community, time, or group.
It shapes how characters act, what they believe, and how conflict unfolds in the text.

It can be used as a form of Persuasive language to built trust e.g. As a doctor with 20 years of experience, I can assure you this treatment works." this apples to personal ethos to gain trust,

and can be used in a cultural sence to affirm or reflect common beliefs, values and emotional tone of a collective identity. e.g. in To Kill a Mockingbird the novel is set in 1930’s Southern USA (collective region) which is deeply rooted in racism and affirms the importance of reputation, family name, and social class, and features unquestioned beliefs in gender roles and traditional values.

Effect:

• Understanding of ethos aids the understanding of why characters act the way they do, as it links indivduals behaviour to larger societal values.

• Can gain an understanding of the authorise view point on this ethos

• Shapes themes and messages of a text like justice vs injustice, tradition vs progress

Pathos

Emotional appeal
The use of emotion to persuade or influence an audience’s response.
It appeals to feelings such as pity, fear, anger, joy, or compassion to evoke empathy or provoke a reaction.

Pathos is a rhetorical device often used in persuasive language to stir emotional responses.
For example, “If we don’t act now, thousands of innocent animals will suffer,” appeals to the audience’s compassion and urgency.
This emotional engagement can override logic or credibility, especially in speeches, advertising, or dramatic monologues.

In a literary context, pathos shapes the emotional tone of a text and can deepen the reader's connection to characters or events.
It may be used to highlight injustice, create moral discomfort, or evoke sympathy, particularly during moments of suffering, loss, or vulnerability.

Effect:

• Pathos helps readers or audiences emotionally invest in the text or speaker.

• It influences how readers perceive characters, conflict, and outcomes, often guiding their moral or emotional alignment.

• Understanding pathos allows readers to analyse how emotion is manipulated or used intentionally to highlight themes like suffering, empathy, injustice, or resilience.

• It can also signal the author’s stance — whether they're aligning with, criticising, or exploiting emotional responses.

Logos

Logical appeal
The use of reasoning, evidence, and logic to persuade an audience.
It appeals to the audience’s sense of rationality through facts, statistics, definitions, analogies, cause-and-effect, and logical progression.

Logos is a rhetorical technique used in argumentative and persuasive texts to present an argument as credible, reasonable, and well-supported.
For example, “Studies show that seatbelts reduce fatal injuries by 45%,” appeals to logic and evidence to support a claim.
This appeal allows speakers and writers to convince their audience by building an argument based on facts rather than emotion or personal authority.

In a literary context, logos can shape the way characters argue, make decisions, or challenge ideas. It can be seen in courtroom scenes, political debates, or moments where characters try to reason their way through moral dilemmas or societal issues.

Effect:

• Logos encourages the audience to think critically and evaluate arguments based on logic rather than emotion or status.

• It supports the construction of balanced, structured arguments and builds credibility through rational appeal.

• Analysing logos allows readers to understand how and why an argument is convincing, and whether the evidence used is reliable, biased, or flawed.

• In literature, logos may also reveal a character’s worldview, rational framework, or internal conflict between logic and emotion.

Euphemism

Mild expression used to replace a harsh one.

E.g. an embarrassed student might tell their parent that they had a ‘working lunch’ rather than admitting to having been given a lunchtime detention for poor behaviour.

Dysphemism

Using harsh words to replace mild ones.

e.g. Instead of "slum," using "hellhole"

Common effect:
- used to express strong emotions
- creates humourous tone

Euphemism

Softens harsh or unpleasent langauge
e.g. "Let go" instead of "fired"

Jargon

Technical terms specific to a particular subject.

Irony

An inconsistency or contradictions that produces humour. A gap between what is said and what is meant.

What are the different types of Irony?

• Verbal irony

• Situational Irony

• Stuctural irony

• Dramatic irony

What is Verbal Irony

Saying the opposite—e.g., “Thanks a lot!” (when annoyed)

Situational Irony

When an outcome is the opposite of what you'd expect in a situation.

E.g. sailing but no water to drink — the expectation clashes with reality.

Structural Irony

Irony built into the structure of the text—often via a naïve or unreliable narrator whose perspective misleads the reader.

e.g. A narrator insists they’re smart, but their repeated mistakes reveal their naïveté instead of intelligence.

Dramatic Irony

Audience knows more than characters—e.g., a character mistakenly trusts a villain. This builds tension or suspense.

Lexical chain

Scattered use of words similar in meaning and purpose.

A lexical chain is a sequence of words that are related in meaning or category, used throughout a text or passage to create semantic cohesion (a sense of connectedness).

These words may be synonyms, repetitions, near-synonyms, or terms that belong to the same semantic field (theme/topic).

They are often scattered, not tightly grouped, and work together to build meaning, tone, or atmosphere.

Note: Writers may use shifting lexical chains to show conflict or transition — for example, a passage that moves from order → tension → collapse by subtly shifting vocabulary within those conceptual fields.

Metonymy

When a word represents something else e.g. rain=sorrow
A word or name that is used in the place of something it is closely related to.

e.g. saying ‘bennies’ instead of ‘Mount St Bendict collage’

Metonymy

The act of referring to something not by its actual name but by a figurative name or the name of something associated with it.

Many everyday phrases are examples of metonymy like using “the suits” to refer to business people.

Example: “Lend me your ears!” (William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar) in which ‘ears’ is used in place of ‘attention’, employing metonymy. 

Synecdoche

Cumulative sentence structure / Listing

• “Deciphered a new word” and “pieced together a sentence” are two small, connected actions, joined with “or,” forming a cumulative structure.

• Effect: Emphasises the gradual, step-by-step process of learning to read.

Unreliable Narration

When the narrator is not telling an accurate or complete story due to personal biases, forgetfulness etc.

Synecdoche

A figure of speech in which a part of something is used to represent the whole, or vice versa, where the whole is used to represent a part. 

Subversion

When something expected or known to the reader, such as a trope or story structure, takes an unexpected direction.

This language technique is usually employed to make a story stand out, or be more memorable and transgressive.

Example: Frozen subverts the ‘love at first sight’ trope in traditional fairytales as the initial love interest is later revealed to be the villain.

Parallels

This involves setting up two characters, situations, settings or ideas to be parallel to one another, reflecting each other but having different outcomes.

Often the stories of a hero and a villain will be parallels, with the villain making the ‘wrong’ choices and the hero the ‘right’ ones. Parallel situations are similar, with a similar setup or scenario having a different outcome to another based on characters and choices.

Omission

What is left out of a text – missing scenes, fade to blacks, conversations only mentioned in passing, etc.

Omissions lend largely to ambiguity and often leave it up to the audience to ‘fill in the blank’ of what may have happened with their own imagination. Sometimes a specific scenario can be implied.

Frame Narrative

This is essentially a ‘story within a story’, wherein the main narrative is being told, remembered, etc. by someone in the ‘outside narrative.’

There are usually parallels between these narratives, contributing to a greater overarching meaning.

Example: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ is a frame narrative as the narrator, Nick Carraway, is telling the story two years after the events transpired.

Fragmentation

Incomplete or broken off sentences or narration. 

This language technique is used most commonly in dialogue to replicate regular speech patterns and being cut off or trailing off while speaking. It is also used outside of dialogue to build suspense, tension or a sense of urgency. Very common in poetry.

Form

The construction and structure of a text based on the text type, the context and the author’s personal stylistic choices.

This can include language choices, sentence structures, film choices, poetic styles (limerick, free verse, etc.) and is often influences by the context and literary styles of the time it was written.

Foil

A foil is another character in a story that specifically contrasts the main character in order to emphasise the main character’s attributes and values or compare the values of the two characters.

Oftentimes a character’s foil will have vastly differing ideas on the same topics, share some kind of similar background or experience, deal with the same situations in different ways, etc.

Figurative Language

Language, words and/or expressions that have meaning beyond their literal interpretation, often used to express links between ideas, characters and concepts or subtly tie into overall themes.

Figurative language includes metaphors, similes, hyperbole, metonymy, personification, etc. and are also frequently used to describe characters and things. Common in poetry.

Dramatic Irony

Any situation wherein the audience is privy to some sort of information that the characters do not know, creating a sense of tension, suspense, or humour.

Catachresis

A figure of speech that involves the use of a word or phrase in a way that deviates from its conventional meaning or usage.

Catachresis is essentially an extreme form of metaphor or analogy, stretching the boundaries of language to create a vivid or striking image. It can involve the application of a word to something that it doesn’t literally apply to, resulting in a surprising or unusual comparison.
Example: “I could smell the silence” uses the word ‘smell’ where it does not usually apply, creating a vivid description of silence through an unusual word choice.

Epigraph 

A short quotation at the beginning of a book or chapter that is reflective of its themes. 

Counter argument 

A rhetorical device presenting the other side of an argument in a persuasive piece in order to take it apart and prove your argument stronger. 

Hyperbaton 

A device which inverts the normal order of words in a sentence, often used for the emphasis of a particular word. It is often used in poetic texts. 

Parody 

When a text imitates a certain style of text to satirise it. It will often employ exaggeration to make obvious the characteristics it wishes to unpick. Often humorous. 

Polysyndeton 

When multiple repetitions of the same conjunction (and, but, if etc) are used in replacement of commas. It extends the sentence out and emphasises each new item that is being connected. 

Synecdoche 

A form of metonymy; it is when part of something is used to represent its whole. 

Tricolon 

A rhetorical device for the series of three parallel words phrases or clauses. Also known as the rule of threes it is agreed in rhetoric that three is a satisfying number to humans – it feels complete. 

Anadiplosis 

When the last word/phrase of one sentence is repeated at the beginning of the next. It is a form of repetition and so emphasises the ideas. However it more powerfully links the clauses by connecting the last idea of one to the beginning of the next. 

Somatic / visceral imager

Somatic imagery represents internal bodily sensations to externalise emotion.

• “Something heavy sinks in his stomach”

• The emotion is not named (fear, dread, guilt)

• Instead, it is felt physically
  e.g. The author employs somatic imagery to manifest the protagonist’s emotional unease as a physical sensation.

Cosmic imagery / Celestial imagery

Where celestial objects, consepts or things are reflenced on earth. “a billion years of stardust”

• “the universe made you”

This draws on astronomical scale to:

• elevate the individual

• suggest inevitability, destiny, and wonder

Blunt declarative syntax

Short, grammatically complete statements with no cushioning language.

Why it hits hard:

• No hesitation

• No emotional softening

• Feels inescapable

Example:

He is dead.

Explaintion: The writer employs blunt declarative syntax to deliver the information with brutal finality.

Parataxis

What it is:
Clauses placed side by side without subordinating conjunctions.

Why it works:

• Mimics shock

• Accelerates pace

• Prevents emotional processing

Example:

‘He fell. He didn’t move. The blood spread.’

Explaintion: Parataxis compresses the moment, forcing the reader to absorb the information rapidly and without emotional mediation.

Lexical minimalism

Using few, simple, often monosyllabic words.
e.g. Gone. Cold. Still.
it lexical minimalism strips the language of ornamentation, intensifying its emotional impact. Feesl raw and factual.

Semantic shock

A sudden shift from neutral or mundane language to violent or painful diction.
E.g. The room was quiet. Then the scream.
Explaintion: disrupts the narrative flow, heightening the immediacy of the revelation.

linguistic brutality

Refusing softened language.
e.g. instead of passed away, using dead or died.
explaintion: conforunds reader with honesty, leaving no time for emoitonal protection for the reader to steal themself.

Temporal compression

Condensing time so the event feels instant. Can suggest irreversiblity.
e.g.One second he was there. Then he wasn’t.

Interjection

Are a grammatical and linguistic feature, that create a sense of sponstanous emotional response.
In reponsies: it must be tied to; tone, emotion or voice
e.g. oh, ah, well, no, yes, alas

E.g. Oh, he’s dead.

Objective correlative

refers to the use of external objects, situations, or physical details to evoke or mirror a character’s internal emotional or psychological state, without that state being explicitly named.

Cognitive dissonance