1.

Allusion: A casual reference in literature to a person, place, event, or

another passage of literature, often without explicit identification.

• If a teacher were to refer to his class as a horde of Mongols, the

students will have no idea if they are being praised or vilified unless
they know what the Mongol horde was and what activities it
participated in historically.

2. Antithesis: Using opposite phrases in close conjunction.

• "Her character is white as sunlight, black as midnight."

3. Apostrophe: Apostrophe is the act of addressing some abstraction or

personification that is not physically present.

• "Oh, Death, be not proud." Death, of course, is a phenomenon

rather than a proud person

4. Diction: The choice of a particular word as opposed to others.

• A writer could call a rock formation by many words--a stone, a

boulder, an outcropping, a pile of rocks, a cairn, or a mound

5. Meiosis: Understatement, the opposite of exaggeration

• "I was somewhat worried when the psychopath ran toward me with
a chainsaw." (i.e., I was terrified).

6. Metaphor: A comparison or analogy stated in such a way as to imply

that one object is another one, figuratively speaking.

• "And take my tears, which are love's wine"

7. Metonymy: Using a vaguely suggestive, physical object to embody a

more general idea.

• "the pen is mightier than the sword"

8. Personification: A figure of speech in which abstractions, animals,

ideas, and inanimate objects are given human character, traits,
abilities, or reactions.

• "The Moon and the Yew Tree," in which the moon "is a face in its
own right, / White as a knuckle and terribly upset. / It drags the sea
after it like a dark crime."
9. Point of view: The way a story gets told and who tells it.

• First person (the narrator speaks as "I" and the narrator is a

character in the story who may or may not influence events within
it)

10. Simile: An analogy or comparison implied by using an adverb such as

like or as, in contrast with a metaphor which figuratively makes the
comparison by stating outright that one thing is another thing.

• Robert Burns states:

O, my luve is like a red, red rose

That's newly sprung in June:
O, my luve is like the melodie
That's sweetly played in tune

Sound Devices

1. Alliteration: Repeating a consonant sound in close proximity to

others, or beginning several words with the same vowel sound.

• "buckets of big blue berries" alliterates with the consonant b.

2. Assonance: Repeating identical or similar vowels (especially in

stressed syllabes) in nearby words.

• Bind up, bind up your yellow hair,

And tie it on your neck;
And see you look as maiden-like
As the day that first we met.

3. Consonance: A special type of alliteration in which the repeated

pattern of consonants is marked by changes in the intervening vowels.

• linger, longer, and languor or rider, reader, raider, and ruder

4. Onomatopoeia: The use of sounds that are similar to the noise they
represent for a rhetorical or artistic effect.

• buzz, click, rattle, and grunt make sounds akin to the noise they
represent.

5. Rhythm: The varying speed, loudness, pitch, elevation, intensity, and

expressiveness of speech, especially poetry.
 • Adam
Had'em.

6. Rhyme: a matching similarity of sounds in two or more words,

especially when their accented vowels and all succeeding consonants
are identical.

• skating/dating, emotion/demotion, fascinate/deracinate, and

plain/stain.

7. Symbolism: several words with similar meaning may coincidentally

have a similar phoneme- combination in them.

• slip
slick
slither
slide

8. Synecdoche: A rhetorical trope involving a part of an object

representing the whole, or the whole of an object representing a part.

• "All hands on deck," he wants the whole sailors, not just their hands.

9. Meter: A recognizable though varying pattern of stressed syllables

alternating with syllables of less stress.
• Masculine Ending:
"'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house,

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse."

• Feminine Ending:

"'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the

housing,

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mousing."