The Basics
the use of language to evoke a picture or a concrete sensation of a person, a thing, a place, or an experience. Evoking the senses (sight, smell, taste, feel, sound).
What is imagery?
"Okonkwo's fame had grown like a bush-fire in the harmattan" (Achebe 3).
What is a simile?
commas without conjunction to separate a series of words, thus emphasizing the parts equally; instead of x, y, and z…the writer uses x, y, z…
What is asyndeton?
An ethical appeal in an argument
What is ethos?
a speaker or writer’s choice of words
What is diction?
Unoka's laziness and priority to live life to the fullest contrasts with Okonkwo's hardworking, violent, and fearful nature.
What is a foil?
The child’s stare begged me to take him out for ice cream even though I’d already said no.
What is personification?
He came, he saw, he conquered.
What is parallel structure?
Appeals to an audience's sense of reason and logic
What is logos?
Dog - some might see it as a cuddly friend, while others see it as something to fear
What is connotation?
the attitude a writer takes toward the subject of a work, the character in it, or the audience, revealed through diction, figurative language, and organization.
What is tone?
All of the following are examples of this literary device:
He’s a couch potato. She’s got a heart of gold. That party was the bomb. Money is the root of all evil.
What is a metaphor?
I was happy to see him there. I was happy he arrived on time. I was happy he left.
What is anaphora?
the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing, especially the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques.
What is rhetoric?
When the two youths turned with the flag, they saw that much of the regiment had crumbled away, and the dejected remnant was coming slowly back.” –Stephen Crane
What is alliteration?
takes place when there is a discrepancy between what is expected to happen, or what would be appropriate to happen, and what really does happen
What is situational irony?
“One could not have known where one’s mouth was in the darkness of that night” (Achebe 95).
What is a hyperbole?
Ex. I have a little ailment – when speaking about having cancer.
What is an understatment?
“I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right down in Alabama little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.”
—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream”
What is pathos?
repetition of two or more consonants with a change in the intervening vowels
What is consonance?
Ex. pitter-patter
Ex. Kurt Vonnegut uses “So it goes” throughout Slaughterhouse-Five to remind the reader of the senseless death.
What is a motif?
a recurring image, word, phrase, action, idea, object, or situation used throughout a work, unifying the work by tying the current situation to previous ones, or new ideas to the theme.
"It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw" (Achebe 13).
What is an allusion?
The phrase “red in tooth and claw” is an allusion to the poem “In Memoriam A. H. H.” (1849) by the nineteenth-century British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
This is an example from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: "Mrs. Hurst and her sister allowed it to be so—but still they admired her and liked her, and pronounced her to be a sweet girl, and one whom they would not object to know more of."
What is polysyndeton?
It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.
What is antithesis?
Martin Luther King: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
What is juxtaposition?