More Language Techniques…

YES…THERE ARE “MORE!”

“At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth Of theeves and murderers: there I him espied, Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.”

• A pause, metrical or rhetorical, occurring somewhere in a line of poetry. The pause may or may not be typographically indicated (usually with a comma). An example from George Herbert's "Redemption":

Caesura.

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An elaborate, usually intellectually ingenious poetic comparison or image, such as an analogy or metaphor in which, say a beloved is compared to a ship, planet, etc. The comparison may be brief or extended.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,Though I must go, endure not yetA breach, but an expansion,Like gold to aery thinness beat,

If they be two, they are two soAs stiff twin compasses are two ; Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no showTo move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,Yet, when the other far doth roam,It leans, and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home.

Conceit.

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. The running over of a sentence or thought into the next couplet or line without a pause at the end of the line; a run-on line. For example, all the lines here are enjambed:

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds Or bends with the remover to remove. . . .” --Shakespeare

Enjambment

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Speech or writing that abuses, denounces, or attacks. It can be directed against a person, cause, idea, or system. It employs a heavy use of negative emotive language. Example:

I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. --Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

Invective.

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Persona.The person created by the author to tell a

story. Whether the story is told by an omniscient narrator or by a character in it, the actual author of the work often distances himself from what is said or told by adopting a persona--a personality different from his real one.

Verisimilitude

How fully the characters and actions in a work of fiction conform to our sense of reality.

To say that a work has a high degree of v________________________ means that the work is very realistic and believable--it is "true to life."

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Anastrophe

Reverse the verb – noun structure of syntactic structure:

“To market she went”

“With you will be the force!” Yoda

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chiasmusA type of rhetoric in which the second part is syntactically balanced against the first. Example:

"There's a bridge to cross the great divide. . . . There's a cross to bridge the great divide. . . ." Coleridge:

Flowers are lovely, love is flowerlike.

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INVERSION the changing of the

usual order of wordsfound mostly in the work

of older classical poetssometimes used by

modern writers for the sake of emphasis

Emily Dickinson was fond of arranging words outside of their familiar order.

Here by the rose-treethey planted onceof Love in Jeopardyan Italian bronze.