The Terms of Success
When someone writes, they try to create certain things in the reader’s mind – to
involve the reader, in other words.
When you do comprehensions, you are asked about these.
Chances are you will be asked,
What is the effect of….
This means: “ What does it make you think or feel? What do the words make you
think of? What do the words sound like? What does the punctuation do to your
sense of the text?
You may also be asked,
How does the language….
…and this means that you need to look for our old friends, the
Literary Terms
Simile: like, or as…as hot as an oven, strong like an ox.
Metaphor: The allotment of death; the skyline a grimace;
the roots of the house (it directly claims that one thing is another).
Personification:
wind wielded blade-light (wind
doesn’t have arms, so it can’t wield anything).
Alliteration:Peter Piper Picked a Peck….(each different
sound has a different feel…some are sharp, strong, slow; some are
lazy, old, troubled…what feel does the alliteration create?)
Assonance: Repeated sounds inside words: luminous
emerald…(It’s a kind of echo, meant to associate certain words)
Rhythm/Metre: How many beats in a line. Is this the
same all the way through, or does the poet change the rhythm?
Enjambment:
When a sentence
Runs over more than
One line of a poem.
Juxtaposition/Contrast: Putting two unusual or
striking or contrasting words or ideas together – orange sky.
Then there is…the whole idea of words. What makes a
word effective? What images, thoughts, feelings, does it create?
Writers are very clever people. Every word is chosen deliberately,
carefully – it may have taken over a month just to find the right word.
So spend time looking at the words, especially in poetry.
We sometimes talk about
connotations.
These are the things the word makes you think of – not its meaning,
but a mixture of who usually uses the word, when they use it and
why they use it.
For example, if you write the word , “oven”, most people would think
of warmth, cosiness, a full stomach and happiness. Some people
might think of the transformation or change of food that happens in
an oven.
SCHOLARS:
You might be interested in a wider
range of rhetorical devices.
Here are a few:
 Anaphora - repeats a word or phrase in successive
phrases - "If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you
tickle us, do we not laugh?” (Merchant of Venice,
Shakespeare)
 anacoluthon: A slight change in the expected
grammatical structure of a sentence: While
walking along, a crash occurred.
 Epizeuxis - repeats one word for emphasis – Mrs
Thatcher famously said to the EU: ‘No, no, no.”
 Hyperbole - an exaggeration - I have done this a
thousand times.
 Litotes - makes an understatement by denying the
opposite of a word that may have been used - The
terms of the contract are not disagreeable to me.
 Oxymoron - a two word paradox – fun run
 synecdoche: Use of part of something to refer to
the whole – Number 10 for the UK Government (It
is run out of 10 Downing Street)
 Parallelism - uses words or phrases with a similar
structure - I went to the store, parked the car and
bought a pizza.