Literary Devices

After two semesters of experimenting with effective lessons on literary devices, I finally found an hour-long lesson plan that showed through in my students’ writing. Before class, I assign each of them a literary device to define on a discussion board.

The List

1. Allusion
2. Catalog
3. Cross-cut (film)
4. Allegory
5. Ekphrasis
6. Elegy
7. Embedded Narrative
8. Establishing Shot (film)
9. Foreshadowing
10. Frame Story
11. Irony
12. Juxtaposition
13. Litany
14. Metaphor
15. Montage (film)
16. Ode
17. Personification
18. Simile
19. Subtext
20. Synesthesia
21. Telling Detail
22. Verisimilitude

During class, I first give them five minutes for the following prompt.

Prompt

Describe a photograph that’s important to you. It can be a photograph that you’ve taken or one that you’re in. DON’T say what the narrative situation is in the photograph: the characters, the overt relationship of the characters, the story. Instead, describe the photograph using all five senses.

Then I we round-robin, defining aloud their literary devices as I write the terms on the board. Once all of the devices are on the board, I choose out one at a time, and ask them to write a few sentences about the photograph they’ve already written on, but using the device. We begin with stylistic devices: metaphor, synesthesia, telling detail, allusion. Last week, my students wrote some simple, beautiful sentences, “The night tasted like bonfire,” “The room was cold as war.” We worked our way to more complex structural devices. I asked them to draw out the narrative collapsed inside the photograph using cross-cuts between scenes, creating a complete memoiristic essay.

Depending on my students’ personal essay rough drafts – whether or not they incorporate literary devices into their style – I might reprise this exercise during my revision unit, having them bring in a draft of their essays to re-write with devices I call out.

Understanding Point of View and Tense

My friend Carolyn sent me this writing prompt, which she assigns to her students in part to show how much tense and point-of-view affects tone. I am thinking of assigning it to my students during my revision unit, but with excerpts from their personal essays.

Part I:

– Write a childhood memory you don’t know why you remember

– Write a dream that is either recurring or recent/vivid

– Write something you did in the last 24 hours (need not be special)

Part II:

– Rewrite the childhood memory in 2nd person and present tense

– Rewrite the dream in 3rd person, switch all genders, and change all proper nouns, like people, place, and brand names. Still past tense.

– Rewrite the thing in 1st person plural, doesn’t matter what tense

THE CAVEAT: You cannot editorialize (in both parts). You cannot express any thoughts, make any comments or judgements. Just. Report. Action. And. Detail.

Close Reading Exercise

Instead of reading responses, I assign discussion board posts for each session’s reading. A long initial response and a shorter response to one of their classmates’ posts. It helps to get the ball rolling on classroom discussion. Of course, my students have difficulty isolating language and form to discuss, so they discuss content. They discuss content and how it relates to their lives. On the first day, I explain three different reading modes: reading as a person (so reading for entertainment, consolation, recognition), reading as a critic (so reading for theme and motif), and reading as a writer (so reading to steal). For this class, I tell them, I want them to read as writers.

As a demonstration of reading in this writer mode, I put up three quotations on the board. I ask them to guess the genre, historical context, and plot of the stories that each quotation introduces.

“You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.”

“I am by birth a Genevese; and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic.”

“I expected this reception. All men hate the wretched; how then must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things!”

What I don’t tell them is that each quotation introduces a section of Frankenstein. We can isolate the words and syntax that usually makes them guess it’s an older text with a dark mood. I can also transition more easily into definitions of mood, tone, syntax, foreshadowing. I then pass around a sheet with definitions of these terms to use in their discussion board posts.

*Thanks to Jeremy Doebert for this awesome first day prompt!

Revising By Ear

I will devote one class session of my Revision unit to revising for the musicality of the language. From final drafts, I can sense that my students have trouble applying this lesson to their revisions, but I still think it’s a worthwhile foray into thinking about language for language’s sake. For the concision and melody of syntax. For the mimetic quality of words to their meaning. I assign the Paris Review interview with Amy Hempel to my students for this lesson, a reading that many of them enjoy as an entrance into a writer’s process. I choose Amy Hempel because she speaks specifically to writing by sound, or letting previous sounds in the paragraph or the sentence dictate the proceeding metaphors and content.

During this class session, I will lecture briefly on the definitions and relationships between signifier and signification, connotation and denotation, and loose, periodic, and parallel sentences. The definitions and examples I use are included below for each prompt.

Writing Prompt

Create a list of signifiers that sound like they WOULD NOT signify their signification.

For example, I think asylum has a very confusing emotional connotation, because it can be both a safe refuge and a frightening house for the insane.

Writing Prompt

Create a list of signifiers that sound like they WOULD signify their signification.

For example, I think that ointment sounds like that gooey balm, probably because it share the ‘oi’ with moist, and ointment is moist.

Writing Prompt

After discussing how signifiers can mimic the emotion and physical sensation of their significations, I will briefly lecture on the difference between loose, periodic, and parallel sentences, using the following definitions and examples.

A loose sentence begins with the main clause, and the subsequent clauses all amplify that first main clause.

“I was fairly sure Boo Radley was inside that house, but I couldn’t prove it, and felt it best to keep my mouth shut or I would be accused of believing in Hot Steams, phenomena I was immune to in the daytime.” -Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

A periodic sentence begins with subsidiary clauses that amplify a main clause that doesn’t come until the very end, usually with a dramatic flourish.

“In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elms trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.” -E.B. White, Stuart Little

A parallel sentence uses the same syntactical pattern in each clause to show that two or more ideas have the same level of importance.

“It is by logic we prove, but by intuition we discover.” -Leonardo da Vinci

I will then show my students three well-published one-sentence short stories and essays: “Tazed” by K.E. Ogden, “Housewife” by Amy Hempel, and “The Thirteenth Woman” by Lydia Davis, all of which can be found online. I ask them to categorize these stories as loose, periodic, or parallel, although all three are a mixture of both. Some of my students can hone in pretty closely to the main clause that creates the complete sentence. This is also a good opportunity to lecture on what constitutes a complete sentence and what constitutes a fragment.

For homework, I ask them to write two one-sentence short stories: one that is primarily a loose sentence and one that is primarily a periodic sentence. I also ask them to write one axiom in a parallel sentence structure.

Writing Prompt

I will write a long, clunky sentence on the board and ask them as a class to identify grammatical and syntactical errors, then to suggest edits for concision.

Writing Prompt

For homework, I will also ask them to find one beautiful or interesting sentence during the week, write it in their journals, and then copy the syntax of the sentence using content and language of their own. I hope that this exercise encourages them to read and imitate in a more myopic way.

*Thanks to Franklin Cline who suggested the signifier exercises and thanks to Nancy Eimers whose lesson on loose and periodic sentences inspired this prompt.

Unsettling Rough Drafts

The best renovation I made to my course was to assign more substantial revision. I don’t even call it “revision” anymore, but instead “unsettling the rough draft,” because I want my students to think of revision as a process of loosening apart their first drafts to find space for new angles and new content. Many of my students think of drafts as “perfect,” in their own words, when it’s simply devoid of typos and grammatical errors. I urge them to discover that writing can never be “perfect”–even the best writing can be better.

Around midterm, I set aside a week for a Revision unit, during which I give them several writing prompts during class, designed to make them write meta-texts and brainstorm new content. My original impetus for the revision unit was completely selfish: I wanted them to do more substantial revision without having to write more comments on their original drafts. So I will write very brief, general comments on my students’ first drafts while putting most of my energy into sweeping revision lesson plans. I’ve found that my students digest my lessons better if they already have a base draft that contextualizes my suggestions.

I begin the unit by asking them what they do when they revise. Most of them simply proofread for typos. Only one or two make any changes to content. I then explain the difference between revision, a “re-envisioning” of content and vehicle; editing, listening for the most articulate, concise, even lovely syntax; and proofreading, reading over for typos and grammatical errors. After we brainstorm, I tell them that their second drafts need to be 90 to 100% different from their first drafts. Their midterm grades depend entirely on the extent of their revisions. I don’t feel guilty asking them to write completely new essays because their essays are so short. I base my personal essay unit off of Brevity literary journal, an online literary journal of brief creative nonfiction, all of it under 750 words. For my persuasive essay unit, I ask them to write an op-ed 750 words or shorter. They’re required to write two personal essays and one op-ed, so they have to write three completely new essays. In some cases, if the subject of their first draft is a dead end, I’ll suggest that they change the subject altogether.

Most of my students have never had to do something like this before, and most of them write vastly, vastly better drafts the second time around. Here are the prompts that I assign in class and for homework.

Writing Prompt

Write a letter to me about one of your personal essays. In your letter, explain what you want to accomplish with this piece. Is your piece informative? Persuasive? Reflective? Entertaining? Moving? What are you trying to communicate about the characters, relationships, or event? What is this essay about? Why is the content important? Analyze your essay the way you would analyze one of our readings for class in a reading response.

Writing Prompt

On the computer, use a search engine and Microsoft Word to create a collage based on one of your personal essays. Perhaps certain images remind you of the setting of your piece. Perhaps images remind you of your characters’ appearances or props you have staged in the essay. Perhaps certain images spark ideas for metaphors or more elaborate description. The composition of the collage isn’t important. What’s important is that the images provide concrete visuals that inspire your mind’s eye.

Now, write non-stop descriptions based on the images in your collage. Push yourself to use all the tools in your toolbox: metaphor, synesthesia, establishing shot, montage, etc. Don’t worry about the flow of your descriptions—you’re generating new content that you might be able to incorporate into your personal essay.

Writing Prompt

Choose one of the following strategies to rewrite that same personal essay, keeping your letter to me in mind and collage pre-write. Here are a few possibilities:

• Write two new introductions
• Begin the essay with an ‘establishing shot,’ like a movie still or photograph, thereby describing the characters through their visual appearances, setting, and physical relationship to one another
• Switch the point-of-view (from first- to third-person or from third- to first-person or into second-person)
• Add dialogue where you just have description of an event
• Rewrite your conclusion as the introduction and then write a new conclusion
• Create a stream of consciousness about what is going on beneath the surface of the action
• Create an opening that starts in the midst of the action

Writing Prompt

Now, unsettle your op-ed rough draft using one of the following techniques:

• Describe a personal experience related to an argument in the paper, using the elements of scene if possible
• Write the opposite op-ed from your opponent’s point of view
• Create a dialogue representing two or more points of view
• Write your argument as a narrative, so that your points are encompassed in a story, possibly from personal experience