Literary devices and rhetorical devices have a good bit of overlap.


We see this literary device in both fiction and poetry. To create an image that’s vivid and engaging, use a range of senses to create your world such as sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste (this is called visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and gustatory imagery, respectively).


Literary elements are “big-picture” literary devices that extend throughout the entire work, such as setting, theme, mood, and allegory. Literary techniques are the literary devices that deal with individual words and sentences, such as euphemisms and alliteration.

The tmesis takes wordplay to a-whole-nother level and is one of the most a-dork-able literary devices you can use. Not sure what a tmesis is? What a co-wink-a-dink. Neither are most people, but nearly everyone has heard of or used them at some point.

Explore literary devices and how you can use them in your story.

Tmesis, another Greek word, means “to cut”. If you think a tmesis is a literary device that allows writers to cut into multi-syllable words with clever one-word quips, you’d be exact-attack-ly right!

Just as chefs use unique ingredients or techniques to create culinary masterpieces, skilled writers use literary devices to create life-changing works of art.

“Literary devices” is a broad, catch-all term for describing the strategies, elements, and techniques that writers and authors use to strengthen their ideas, add personality to their prose, and supercharge their writing.

A metaphor is probably the most popular literary device in literature. And no wonder – thanks to our great pattern recognition skills, we humans love to compare one thing to another.


22 Essential Literary Devices and How to Use Them In Your Writing

And that’s exactly what literary devices are for. Apart from setting the theme and mood of the story, they also serve to bring out the meaning and beauty in everyday language, forcing us to think critically and creatively during the reading experience.

22 Different Types of Literary Devices and How to Use Them ; 1

Language techniques are words or phrases that convey a meaning which is different to the literal one. For example, 'My love is like a red red rose' does not literally mean that their love is like an actual flower you can pick or grow. The speaker is trying to get across the idea that their love is beautiful - as well as other positive associations we might connect with a 'red red rose', like natural or intense.

112 Common Literary Devices: Definitions & Examples

This device serves as a figurative language that helps to draw a picture in the readers' minds. Use imagery if you want your reader to understand emotions and the mood of the character. Sometimes, a line containing imagery can sound much more powerful than the whole paragraph without expressive language devices. Example:

100 Literary Devices With Examples: The Ultimate List

This sentence abruptly changes tack midway through. Rather than learn what happened after Dorothea arrived, we witness the narrator question Dorothea’s role in the narrative. This use of anacoluthon grabs the reader’s attention while pivoting the focus and widening the scope. Anacoluthon can also express the speaker’s mental or emotional state by showing how their thoughts jump around.

What are some tips for writing literary devices in an essay

Do you think that an apostrophe is a punctuation mark? An apostrophe is a literary term that is often confused with the punctuation mark because not all students know that another meaning of this word is the literacy tool. It is used if the author refers to the individual who isn’t there or the object that does not exist. Fiction, poetry, and music are the three most popular areas of an apostrophe.

A Master-List of 30 Common Literary Devices [Examples Included]

Made up of two different words (“anti” and “thesis”), antithesis is a literary device that juxtaposes opposing ideas, words, or images. Usually, these two contrasting ideas will be written with similar grammatical structure for dramatic effect.