Essential Literary Devices and Rhetorical Figures

Phonetic Resources

• Alliteration: Repetition of phonemes or syllables in several words.
• Onomatopoeia: The formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named.
• Paronomasia: A play on words that sound similar but have different meanings.
• Antanaclasis: Repetition of a word with different meanings.
• Pun: A play on words where identical sounds form words with different meanings.

Syntactic Resources

• Anaphora: Repetition of words at the beginning of successive verses or statements.
• Epiphora: Repetition of a word at the end of several verses or periods.
• Anadiplosis: Repeating the last element of a group of words at the beginning of the next.
• Epanadiplosis: Repetition of a word at the beginning and end of a verse or sentence.
• Polysyndeton: Repetition of conjunctions where syntax does not strictly require them.
• Polyptoton: Repeating the same word with different tenses or inflections.
• Enumeration: A sequence of words with the same syntactic function.
• Parallelism: Distributed parallel words, phrases, and sentences.
• Correlation: Successive terms in a syntactic series.
• Hyperbaton: Disturbing the normal order of a sentence by changing element positions.
• Chiasmus: Cross-order of elements in two groups of words.
• Asyndeton: Intentional omission of conjunctions between words or sentences.

Semantic Resources

• Hyperbole: Exaggeration for effect.
• Pleonasm: Use of superfluous or redundant words.
• Antithesis: Juxtaposition of two opposing word meanings in one sentence.
• Oxymoron: Juxtaposition of two contradictory terms in one phrase.
• Paradox: The union of two apparently contradictory terms.
• Litotes: Understatement, often expressed by denying the opposite.
• Irony: Asserting an idea where the context implies the opposite.
• Personification: Attributing human qualities to animals or inanimate objects.
• Apostrophe: An appeal to an animate or inanimate entity, present or absent.
• Metaphor: Identification of two objects, a real one and an image, in the same sentence.
• Allegory: A succession of metaphors.
• Comparison: Connection, via a link, between a real object and an image object.
• Periphrasis: A detour that avoids a direct expressive term.
• Metonymy: The designation of an object with the name of another with which it correlates.
• Synesthesia: The crossing of two sensory images.