Essential Literary Devices and Rhetorical Figures Explained

Essential Literary Devices and Rhetorical Figures

• Alliteration: Occurs when repeating a phoneme or group of phonemes. Example: "A Polyphemus, horror of that siear, Barbara hut is gue album berry, and redil spacious where enci to err when run roughly cumbers ras cabrio."
• Onomatopoeia: A type of alliteration that mimics real sounds. Example: "The ticking of the watchmaker."
• Anaphora: The repetition of one or more words at the initial position of a phrase or verse. Example: "All wear a dress, a shoe fit all, all eat a banana, they are all pretty."
• Paronomasia: The use of two words with similar signifiers but different meanings. Example: "Clouds are ships and not."
• Polysyndeton: Coordinating various elements of language through abundant repeated conjunctions. Example: "The meadow and valley, the flute and laughed and fuente..."
• Epithet: Adding adjectives that characterize a noun to praise or insult. Example: "Oh sweet clothes for my bad found, sweet and happy when God wanted..."
• Asyndeton: The opposite of polysyndeton; removing conjunctions where they would normally appear. Example: "A laugh, eyes, hands, my feelings."
• Ellipsis: The removal of a term from a sentence that is understood through context. Example: "Cry always my biggest advantage, and gall penalties are any snack, night desire, and quiet care, and battle hard bed."
• Hyperbaton: Variation of the usual syntactical order. Example: "This, therefore, formidable land, the melancholy yawning void; fallen has been a carnation..."
• Parallelism: Dividing a syntactic period into members of similar length, tone, and structure. Example: "Rich strength, faith and rich; snow tal is bellos, eyes this is the fire of light serena..."
• Simile or Comparison: Relating a real term with an imaginary one using connectors like "what" or "how." Example: "His eyes are like two black beetles."
• Metaphor: The transfer of meaning between a real and an imaginary word. Examples: "Golden hair" (impure) or "Fires of heaven" (pure metaphor for stars).
• Hyperbole: Altering reality in an exaggerated way. Example: "There was a man with a nose stuck..."
• Irony: Expressing the opposite of what is meant. Example: "The bowling not download any movie."
• Paradox: Combining two irreconcilable ideas to reveal a profound truth. Example: "I live without living in me, life so high I hope I die because I do not die."
• Antithesis: Using two contrasting antonyms in discourse. Example: "The sweet, bitter, true story..."
• Personification: Attributing human properties to natural world realities. Example: "Murmur sources, the heavens weep..."