Codes and Conventions
Codes and Conventions and Structures: When writing a
response to a given text, students must consider how the author uses
codes, conventions and structures (literary devices) to affect their
appreciation and understanding of the text itself.
 Alliteration:
The repetition of similar sounds, usually consonants, at the
beginning of words. For example: “Peter Piper picked a
peck of pickled peppers.”
Ex: ______________________________

Anthropomorphism: When you give human
characteristics to animals, it is called
anthropomorphism. For example: Fairy tales and
fables often personify animals like in the story
of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, or the
Tortoise and the Hare.
Ex: _________________________________
 Cliché: An expression, such as “turn over a new
leaf,” that has been used and reused so many times that it
has lost its expressive power.
Ex:_______________________________
 Foreshadowing: An author’s deliberate use of hints or
suggestions to give a preview of events or themes that do
not develop until later in the narrative. For example:
Images of a storm brewing or a crow landing on a
fence post often foreshadow ominous (threatening)
developments in a story.
Ex:_______________________________
 Hyperbole: An excessive overstatement or conscious
exaggeration of fact. “I’ve told you that a million
times already” is a hyperbolic statement.
Ex:_______________________________
 Imagery: Language that brings to mind sensory
impressions. For example: Using words to create
powerful images of a haunted house in the mindseye of the reader.
Ex: _______________________________
 Irony: Broadly speaking, irony is a device that
emphasizes the contrast between the way things are
expected to be and the way they actually are. An
historical example of irony might be the fact that
people in medieval Europe believed bathing
would harm them when in fact not bathing led to
the unsanitary conditions that caused the
Bubonic plague.
Ex: _______________________________
 Metaphor: The comparison of one thing to
another that does not use the terms “like” or “as.” A
metaphor from Shakespeare’s Macbeth: Life is
but a walking shadow.
Ex:_______________________________
 Motif: A recurring structure, contrast, or other device
that develops a literary work’s major themes. For example,
shadows and darkness are a motif in Charles
Dickens’s, A Tale of Two Cities, a novel that
contains many gloomy scenes and settings.
Ex:_______________________________
 Onomatopoeia: The use of words like pop, hiss, or
boing, in which the spoken sound resembles the actual
sound.
Ex: _______________________________
 Oxymoron: The association of two terms that seem to
contradict each other, such as “jumbo shrimp” or wise
fool, or bitter sweet.”
Ex:_______________________________
 Personification: The use of human characteristics to
describe animals, things, or ideas. Personification is a figure
of speech in which human qualities are given to objects,
animals or ideas. For example: The fire breathed hot
in our faces and grabbed at our clothes.
Ex:_______________________________
 Point of View: The perspective from which a speaker or
writer recounts the narrative or presents information.
Depending on the topic, purpose, or audience,
writers of non-fiction may rely on the firstperson(I, we), the second-person (you, your),
or the third person (he, she, it, they)
Ex: _______________________________
 Sarcasm: A form of verbal irony in which it is obvious
from context and tone that the speaker means the opposite
of what he or she says. For example: Saying, “That was
graceful” when someone trips and falls is an
example of sarcasm.
Ex: _______________________________
 Simile: A comparison of two things through the use of the
words like or as. For example: His untidy room looks
like an erupting volcano.
Ex:_______________________________
 Symbol: An object, character, figure, place or color used
to represent an abstract idea or concept. For example:
The two roads in Robert Frost’s poem “The Road
Not Taken” symbolize the choice between two
paths in life.
Ex:_______________________________
 Theme: A fundamental, universal idea explored in a
literary work. The struggle to achieve the American
Dream, for example, is a common theme in 20thcentury in American Literature.
Ex: _______________________________
 Thesis: The central argument that an author makes in a
work. A thesis is a statement that a writer intends
to support and prove.
Ex: _______________________________
 Tone: The general atmosphere created in a story, or the
author’s or narrator’s attitude toward the story or the
subject. A tone is an attitude of a writer toward a
subject matter or audience. Tone is generally
conveyed through the choice of words or the
point of view of a writer on a particular subject.
Ex: _______________________________
 Remember that when writing an effective response to a
given text the reader must actively discover the
various codes, conventions and structures (literary
devices) the author uses to convey his/her message.