🔎 How to Identify English Techniques: Your Ultimate Literary Cheat Sheet

📚 What Is a Literary Technique?

Literary techniques (also called literary devices or figurative language) are tools that composers use to shape meaning, engage readers, and enhance the depth of a text. These techniques might evoke emotions, highlight contrasts, or simply add a bit of spice to an otherwise straightforward passage.

Whether you're analysing a novel, poem, or speech, understanding these techniques will help you write stronger essays and appreciate the craft of writing on a deeper level.

🔍 How to Identify Literary Techniques (Step-by-Step)

1. Read the whole passage
Start by reading the relevant section of text in full to get a general understanding.

2. Determine the purpose
What effect is the composer trying to create? Consider the mood, tone, or message of the text.

3. Identify how the purpose is achieved
Look for specific techniques that support the purpose. For example, does the author use contrast to highlight personality differences?

4. Zoom into sentences
Now analyse on a sentence level. Which literary devices are being used (e.g. metaphor, personification)? What is their effect?

🧠 Common Literary Techniques (Organised by Category)

🧭 Narrative Conventions

• Allusion – Reference to another text, event, or belief (e.g. biblical allusion)
• Foreshadowing – Hints at future events
• Intertextuality – Direct reference to another text
• Archetype – Recurring idea, theme, or character type
• Contrast – Highlights differences between two characters or ideas
• Form – Text type and structure influence delivery (e.g. novel, poem, play)
• Hyperbole – Exaggeration for emphasis
• Irony – Words used to express the opposite of their literal meaning
• Motif – Repeated symbol or idea
• Symbolism – Object or image representing a deeper meaning
• Subversion – Breaking or twisting narrative expectations
• Tense – Use of past, present, or future

🎨 Descriptive Language

• Imagery – Language that appeals to the senses (e.g. visual, auditory, tactile)
• Metaphor – A direct comparison without “like” or “as”
• Simile – A comparison using “like” or “as”
• Personification – Attributing human qualities to non-human things

🗣️ Voice and Dialogue

• Anecdote – A short personal story
• Dialogue – Characters or narrators speaking
• Humour – Comic language that lightens tone or creates contrast
• Register – Formal or informal tone, often shifting depending on context
• Narrative Person:
  • First person – “I”, “we”
  • Second person – “you”
  • Third person – “he”, “she”, “they”
• Tone – The emotional feel or attitude behind the words (e.g. melancholic, hopeful)

✍️ Poetic Conventions

• Alliteration – Repetition of initial consonant sounds
• Assonance – Repetition of vowel sounds
• Sibilance – Repetition of “s” sounds for softness or hissing tone
• Fragmentation – Incomplete sentences to create tension or impact
• Enjambment – A sentence flows across line breaks in poetry

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📝 How to Annotate a Text (Example)

Let’s apply what you’ve learned to a real example. This excerpt comes from The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula Le Guin:

A child of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd alone, playing on a wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him, for he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thin magic of the tune. 

He finishes, and slowly lowers his hands holding the wooden flute. 

As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rear on their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke the horses' necks and soothe them, whispering. "Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my hope..." They begin to form in rank along the starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun.

🎯 What is the purpose of this excerpt?

To introduce the reader to Omelas—a fictional, utopian world—and to immerse them in its rich atmosphere.

🔍 Techniques Used:

• Present tense – e.g. “sits”, “sounds” – makes the moment feel real and current.
• Auditory imagery – e.g. “sweet, thin magic of the tune”, “neigh in answer” – helps the reader hear and feel the world.
• Dialogue – e.g. “Quiet, quiet, there my beauty…” – adds realism and emotional depth.
• Simile – “like a field of grass and flowers” – paints a utopian and peaceful setting.

This example shows how literary techniques come together to build an immersive world and convey mood, tone, and character.

Throughout the excerpt, the readers are immersed in this fictional world through Le Guin’s use of present-tense (e.g. “a child of nine or ten sits…”), describing events as if happening in real time. The variation in sentence length and structure also engage the reader, as it provides a natural ebb and flow of description.

Narrowing down on each sentence, we can see that Le Guin uses a lot of auditory imagery (e.g. the tune of the flute,, the neigh of horses, etc.) to further involve the readers’ senses in imagining this world. By including the dialogue of a rider with their horse, life and believability is brought to this fictional world. And finally, a simile comparing crowds to a field of grass and flowers conveys the idea of Omelas being a utopia.

FAQs

Written by KIS Academics Tutor for HSC English, Rachel Xie. Rachel is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Commerce/Fine Arts at UNSW and has received stellar reviews from her past KIS Academics students. You can view Rachel's profile here and request her as a tutor.