literary devices

• Hamartia is a fatal flaw leading to the downfall of a tragic hero.
• An allusion is a form of figurative language in which reference is made to text, event, person or place. By alluding to one of these, the writer relies on the reader's contextual knowledge and makes an implicit comparison between what is presented and what is known. Allusion is a device found in all kinds of texts from ads to novels.
• Alliteration is the repetition of sound at the beginning of several words. For example, 'strive, strife and style' all begin with the 'st' sound. This cartoon also shows an example of alliteration where the 'a' sound is repeated in every word. Depending on the sound that is repeated, the use of alliteration can have different effects on an audience. Generally speaking, however, alliteration is used to express the lyrical qualities of language.
• Bildungsroman is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood
• Analogy is a cognitive process of transferring traits from one thing or idea to another. In propaganda we often see false analogies used as a tool to persuade an audience, where the target is unjustly compared to another source, such as: '9/11 is our generation's Pearl Harbor.'
• Anaphora is the repetition of the same word/phrase in a succession of phrases or sentences. Anaphora is often used to establish rhetorical or 'literary' effect.
• An anti-ad draws your attention to and makes you aware of the conventions of advertising. In effect anti-ads seems to tell the audience that they are smart enough to see through the tricks played by advertisers. Not only does an anti-ad break the rules of advertising. It shows you how and why they have done this.

  The notion of anti-advertising started in the 1950s with the 'lemon' ad from Volkswagen. 'Lemon', is another world for a bad car. Calling their cars 'lemons' shocks readers into reading the rest of a lengthy infomercial about their strict inspection process at the Volkswagen factory.
• Antithesis is a contrast between ideas (the thesis and antithesis) by placing them together for (often rhetorical or literary) effect.
• Appeal to authority is an argumentation technique, in which one refers to a source that claims to have authority. It is an argumentation fallacy because it assumes that authorities or institutions are right.
• The bandwagon effect is a propaganda technique that suggests one should do something because everyone else is doing it. It is an argumentation fallacy, because something does not have to be true if everyone is doing it.
• Cacophony is discordant, rugged or hard-sounded effects in prose or verse, usually produced by clusters of consonants arranged so as to make pronunciation difficult. Cacophony is frequent in comical verse and tongue-twisters.
• Colloquialism can be regarded as a kind of expression or grammar that is associated with ordinary, everyday speech rather than formal language. Colloquialism may simply be an intended relaxed way of speaking or writing.
• Aposiopesis is a figure of speech wherein a sentence is deliberately broken off and left unfinished, the ending to be supplied by the imagination of the reader. As in "his behavior was—but I blush to mention that".
• Deictic are words that point in various directions, within a text and beyond it. For example, ‘down there’, ‘this’, ‘that’ etc. Deictic expressions may also point in time, as in ‘now’, ‘then’, and ‘next year’.
• From the French for 'unknotting', denouement refers to the final unfolding of plot in a literary work. It is at this point that the reader's expectations of what will happen to literary characters are either satisfied or denied.
• A dialect is a unique and distinguishable combination of vocabulary, pronunciation and syntax. Technically speaking from a linguistic perspective, the only difference between a language and a dialect is that a language is usually standardised.
• A diatribe is a severely critical type of discourse, often spoken, characterised by anger directed towards something or someone. A bitter and abusive speech or piece of writing, less formally known as a rant.
• Sentence functions:

  1. declarative: makes a statement
  2. interrogative: asks a question
  3. imperative: gives a command
  4. exclamatory: expresses strong feelings
• Periodic sentences: a sentence in which the main idea (subject and verb) comes at the end of the sentence; the sentence is not grammatically complete until the end.
• Cumulative sentence: a sentence which begins with the main idea, which is followed by phrases and clauses which elaborate on the idea.
• Rhetorical question: A question that is asked to make a point or to make the reader think.
• Parallelism: The repetition of words or phrases in a sentence for emphasis. All phrases are placed with equal weigh, to strengthen the argument.
• Inversion or anastrophe, in literary style and rhetoric, the syntactic reversal of the normal order of the words and phrases in a sentence. This inverted order will cause a reader to pause or change the rhythmic effect of words.
• Hypophora, also referred to as anthypophora or antipophora, is a figure of speech in which the speaker poses a question and then answers the question.