Literary Devices
"Dead in the middle of Little Italy little did we know
That we riddled some middlemen who didn't do diddly." -Big Pun, "Twinz" (Justin Holmes)
assonance
So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania..." Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream. (Oliver Pajdo)
anaphora
The kind of irony you have when a policeman is pulled over by another policeman.
situational
Soft and harmonious language sounds like you hear in "twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are, up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky." (Cailin Lampert)
euphony
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
pun
A group of boys wearing matching outfits dance around and sing, overly dramatically, to One Direction’s “Best Song Ever.” This is a __________. (Michaela McGregor)
parody
A poem written to honor someone who has died.
elegy
harsh and inharmonious sounds in language (Alex Hardy)
cacophony
“Consciousness of place came ebbing back to him slowly over a vast tract of time unlit, unfelt, unlived.” - Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Edmund Chua)
asyndeton
She "went straight home, in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair.” Dickens The Pickwick Papers
zeugma
word choice
diction
"The Crown" representing the Royal family is an example of this. (Kylie Miller)
metonymy
The poor old woman passed away.
euphemism
Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible were just a couple of tzars.
epithet
I love the sound of bacon sizzling on a weekend. (Salvador Reyes)
onomatopeoia
“There were frowzy fields, and cow-houses, and dunghills, and dustheaps, and ditches, and gardens, and summer-houses, and carpet-beating grounds….” --Dickens, Dombey and Son (Madisyn Owens)
polysyndeton
Some forms of this are first person, third person omniscient, and third person limited.
point of view
Aslan the Lion from the Narnia series, who speaks and acts as a guide, is an example of this. (Emily Dombrowski)
anthropomorphism
A short, clever saying, such as "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." (Reece Smith)
epigram
sentence structure
syntax
The dictionary definition of a word and the meanings we associate with that word are the _____________and ____________________.
denotation and connotation
Ironic understatement. "Global warming is not cool."(Chey Miller)
litotes
Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How Do I Love Thee?"--a 14-line poem consisting of an octave and a sestet
Petrarchan sonnet
An inverted relationship in parallel phrases.
“But O, what damned minutes tells he o’er
Who dotes, yet doubts; suspects, yet strongly loves.” -- Wm. Shakespeare, Othello
(Cora Hyatt)
chiasmus
In the movie Up, a young child finding his future and an old guy reconciling his past is an example of ______________. (Leyla Gulsen)
juxtaposition