Top Literary Techniques to Get Top Marks in English Literature Exams

Sound techniques

Language is made up of sounds. You shouldn’t comment on every sound in writing, partially because it would take forever, but also because most sounds aren’t significant or deliberate. But sometimes we use the same or similar sounds in a short space, and it can make particular effects, and these are worth commenting on.

Now, a common technique taught at schools is alliteration which means

the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words

and a common analysis of this is that it ‘adds emphasis’. While this might be, we can be much more specific in analysing the types of repeated sounds that are occurring, and the effect this causes, and we can also analyse sounds that repeat throughout the word, not just at the start of the sentence. The most common sounds that we can analyse are plosives, fricatives/sibilants and assonance.

Plosives:

Definition: A consonant sound made by stopping airflow out of the mouth, and then suddenly releasing it. E.g. D, K, P T, and sometimes B, C, and G when ‘hard’ in their pronunciation.

The key to telling if something is a plosive, is whether your mouth closes when you’re trying to say the letter. Give it a go. Notice that when you say p as in police, or the d and the g in dog, that your mouth closes to form the letter, and then makes the letter by expelling air as your mouth opens. By contrast if you say the words ice or eye or isosceles your mouth stays open the whole time. That’s because these words don’t have any plosives in them.

How do we analyse it

Plosives tend to abrupt or harsher sounds, so when we use lots of them together it tends to make speech sound more intense, intimidating, passionate, or angry. In fact, when people are feeling these emotions, they’ll often start using more words that contain plosives subconsciously in order to express them. So, when we’re analysing sentences that utilise lots of plosive sounds, we’re likely to make the point that it emphasises feelings that are aggressive, authoritative, or impassioned.

Example

‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!’

King Lear, Act 3, Scene II

This line, from King Lear, utilises both a metaphor and personification in implying that the wind has cheeks (like a person) and is blowing so hard that it could crack them open with the effort. We can add to this analysis, by pointing out the utilisation of plosives:

Blow winds and crack your cheeks

Analysis

When we put all this together, we can say something like the following:

‘De-throned, unhoused, and soaked to the bone: the pathetic fallacy of Lear’s storm drives home the extent of his loss, and the increasing unmooring of his mental state. His invocation not only personifies the wind, but functions as a metaphorical challenge, in which he invites the storm to try so hard to harm him, it harms itself. The violent plosive language not only shows Lear’s desolate state and his desire to be unmade, but his provocation of the synecdochic* wind also reveals his despairing, and perhaps selfish, desire that nature be unmade with him. Having lost his place in the world, and feeling that the world has become his antagonist, and seeing no path to redemption, Lear resolves childishly, futilely, and yet also sympathetically, that the world should at least break itself in breaking him’.

*(a part of the whole symbolising the whole. E.g., here the wind (part of nature) represents the whole of nature. Another example might be referring to a car as ‘wheels’).

Fricatives/Sibilants:

Definition: Fricatives are a consonant sound made by forcing air through a narrow space e.g. F, TH, the Z in ‘zoo’, the S in ‘said’. Sibilants are a type of fricative pronounced with a higher pitch and amplitude, usually with the letters S and Z.

When you make a fricative (or sibilant), your lips purse closely together without closing, and you then push air through the gap. They can usually be analysed together as they largely have similar effects. Notably, when lots of sibilants are used close together to make a hissing sound, this is known as sibilance.

How do we analyse it

Fricatives are often soft sounds, which can help a writer to create a gentle or soothing tone. However, in the case of sibilance, the low-level hissing noise can instead be used to create a sinister or malicious undertone. It depends on the sentence: see what you think the writer might be trying to do and decide for yourself whether the sounds used seemed to support that, or work against it.

Example

‘Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us’

Exposure, Wilfred Owen

Similarly to Shakespeare in King Lear, Wilfred Owen is personifying the weather and terrible conditions endured by soldiers in the trenches during World War I. The sibilance here can be analysed as follows:

Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us

Reading this, I’m particularly drawn to the last six words. That’s because they not only used sibilance and repeated plosive sounds (the ‘d’ in ‘winds’ and ‘iced’), they’re also all monosyllables, meaning words that have one syllable.

Analysis

When we put this all together, we can say something like:

‘Owens’ utilisation of percussive plosives alongside the more subtle and hissing sibilance creates an impression of a wind as forceful as it is insidious. The verb ‘knive’ personifies the wind as actively seeking to cut the soldiers open: the cold working its way under their clothes, their skin, and into their core. The six monosyllables that end the line function alongside the side effects to create mimesis: sharp, short, and invisible, Owens’ language creates the sound of the icy wind howling, or of a knife slashing through air, as though all of these sounds were one.’

Assonance:

Definition: Assonance is the use of the similar vowel sounds, either through using the same vowel sound and different consonants (e.g. porridge and sonnet), or from similar vowel sounds with identical consonants (e.g. killed, cold, culled).

Assonance is one the most important literary techniques in the English language. If you’ve ever read something and thought it sounded pretty, but weren’t sure why, it was probably assonance. Notably, even in the Wilfred Owens’ quotation above, there’s a lot of assonance in the repetition of E and I sounds. Assonance is generally easy to spot – try reading something out loud and listen out for the vowels.

How do we analyse it

Assonance can have lots of different effects, and contributes enormously to flow, rhythm and tone (particularly in a lot of poetry).

Example

‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies’

Ozymandias, Percy Shelley

We can analyse the assonance here as follows:

‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies’

There’s also some repetition of the U sound in ‘trunkless’ and ‘sunk’, but let’s focus on the A sound for now.

Analysis

The obvious and lower-level analysis here would be to spot the assonance and then claim that it ‘adds emphasis’. This is okay, and would get a passing grade, but let’s see what else we can come up with (this time without utilising other literary techniques):

‘The assonance of the repeated A sound functions hypnotically but arrhythmically, regular enough that the reader’s ear comes to expect it, but not so regularly that it can be anticipated when it is coming. It comes and goes, chips and flakes of repeated language dispersed irregularly through Shelley’s lines, like fragments of something buried. And as the lines progress, the amount of assonance intensifies, doubling in the last line to four instances of the letter A, just at the moment of revealing the largest remaining fragment: the severed head of the statue of Ozymandias.’