Distinguishing Literary Devices

Literature · 10 questions

Identify literary devices from concise definitions and examples.

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1. Describing one thing as another by direct identification; example: “Life is a journey.”

   1. Metonymy
   2. Personification
   3. Metaphor
   4. Simile
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   C) Metaphor

2. What device appears in the explicit comparison “brave as a lion”?

   1. Zeugma
   2. Metaphor
   3. Simile
   4. Analogy
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   C) Simile

3. Using a whole for a part or a part for a whole; example: “The roofs of the city” for its houses.

   1. Synecdoche
   2. Imagery
   3. Alliteration
   4. Metonymy
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   A) Synecdoche

4. Using “the crown” to mean the monarch is an example of which device?

   1. Synecdoche
   2. Metonymy
   3. Metaphor
   4. Irony
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   B) Metonymy

5. Attributing a human action to a nonhuman thing; example: “The wind whispered.”

   1. Hyperbole
   2. Animism
   3. Onomatopoeia
   4. Personification
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   D) Personification

6. A contrast between what is said and what is meant; example: calling a day “lovely” during a downpour.

   1. Verbal irony
   2. Situational irony
   3. Dramatic irony
   4. Synecdoche
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   A) Verbal irony

7. Combining two contradictory terms in one short phrase; example: “bittersweet.”

   1. Parallelism
   2. Oxymoron
   3. Alliteration
   4. Antithesis
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   B) Oxymoron

8. Repeating a word at the beginning of successive clauses; example: “I came, I saw, I conquered.”

   1. Anaphora
   2. Polysyndeton
   3. Anadiplosis
   4. Epistrophe
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   A) Anaphora

9. Repetition of initial consonant sounds in nearby words; example: “dark deep desert.”

   1. Meter
   2. Alliteration
   3. Consonance
   4. Assonance
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   B) Alliteration

10. Which device crosses ideas or grammatical structures in an A-B-B-A pattern without repeating the same words in reverse order?

    1. Epistrophe
    2. Antimetabole
    3. Parallelism
    4. Chiasmus
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    D) Chiasmus