English 20-1 · Devices and language
Naming it is the easy half
Identifying a metaphor is worth almost nothing on its own. What is marked is whether you can say what the comparison does to a reader, and why the writer chose that one rather than plain statement.
- 1. The words, first
- 2. Devices by family
- 3. Writing about effect
- 4. The three ironies
- 5. What costs marks
The words, first
The idea: Grouping devices by what they do makes them far easier to use than an alphabetical list.
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Simile | A comparison using like or as. |
| Metaphor | A comparison without the connective, so it asserts rather than suggests: her voice was gravel. |
| Extended metaphor | A comparison developed consistently, so each detail corresponds to something. |
| Personification | Human qualities given to something not human. Ask which quality — malice, indifference, tenderness. |
| Hyperbole / understatement | Deliberate exaggeration and deliberate restraint. Both work by the gap between what is said and what is meant. |
| Imagery | Language appealing to the senses. Not only sight, and the senses a passage ignores are worth noticing. |
| Alliteration / assonance / consonance | Repeated initial consonants, repeated vowels, repeated consonants elsewhere. |
| Verbal irony | Saying the opposite of what is meant. |
| Situational irony | An outcome opposite to what was expected. |
| Dramatic irony | The audience knowing something a character does not. |
| Symbol | A concrete thing standing for an abstract idea. |
| Motif | A recurring element that accumulates significance by repetition. |
| Allusion | A reference to another work, importing its associations in a few words. |
Devices by family
The idea: Four groups: comparison, sound, structure and the ones built on a gap between expectation and reality.
Comparison. Simile, metaphor, personification, analogy. The question to answer is always: what does comparing A to B make the reader understand or feel that plain statement would not?
Sound. Alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, rhythm. These bind words together and control pace. They matter when the sound reinforces the sense.
Structure and syntax. Repetition, parallelism, sentence length, fragments, the order things are revealed.
Gap devices. The three ironies, plus satire and paradox. All of them depend on a reader noticing a distance.
Writing about effect
The idea: One sentence: this technique, in this place, does this to the meaning. That sentence is the mark.
Weak: “The author uses a metaphor.”
Better: “The author compares the city to a machine.”
Strong: “Comparing the city to a machine strips its people of agency — machines have parts, not participants — which prepares the reader for the narrator's later indifference to a stranger's collapse.”
Extended metaphors are effective when the correspondence is sustained, because it lets a writer think through the comparison rather than decorate with it. A mixed metaphor breaks it, usually along with the reader's attention.
Allusions only work if the reader recognises the source, so choosing one is a decision about audience. Saying that is often more interesting than identifying the reference.
The three ironies
The idea: These get confused more than anything else on the list, and the distinction is easy once stated.
| Type | The gap is between | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Verbal | What is said and what is meant | “Lovely weather,” in a downpour |
| Situational | What was expected and what happens | A fire station burns down |
| Dramatic | What the audience knows and what the character knows | The audience knows the drink is poisoned |
Not everything unexpected is ironic. Coincidence and bad luck are not situational irony; the reversal has to run against an expectation the text deliberately set up.
Symbol or motif? They overlap — a symbol can be a motif if it recurs. The distinction worth holding is that a symbol points outward to an idea, while a motif accumulates meaning by repetition.
What costs marks
The idea: The catalogue problem, mostly.
- Listing devices without saying what any of them do.
- Calling every comparison a metaphor. If it uses like or as, it is a simile.
- Labelling coincidence as irony.
- Writing “this creates imagery” and stopping. Imagery of what, appealing to which sense, producing what effect?