15 Literary Devices Students Need to Know
There is SO. MUCH. TO. COVER. in an ELA classroom, and unless you have superpowers or a roomful of shockingly quick, motivated learners, you’re going to have to prioritize.
In addition to vocabulary, grammar, personal statements (for senior classes), and whatever additional projects your site has come up with, there is the question of how to handle literary devices. They may not be specifically called out in the Common Core standards the same way they used to be (at least in our California state standards), but we’re English teachers: aren’t we supposed to make sure students know them all?
We’ve come to believe most students don’t need an in-depth understanding of most literary devices. Unless students plan to become English majors, the likelihood they will encounter the majority of these terms is small; it’s far more important students practice reading a variety of texts and can articulate their thoughts about those texts effectively.
Even AP Literature, which one or both of us taught for 14 years, focuses more on understanding a text and supporting an interpretation than on demonstrating mastery of a long list of literary devices. A student who provides a thoughtful, well-supported interpretation but only references one literary term is likely to score higher than a student who identifies multiple literary devices but is unable to connect them to the meaning of the work as a whole.
Certainly, it can be helpful for students to have a basic familiarity with terms like alliteration or caesura, but when it comes down to it, the list of literary devices students really benefit from knowing isn’t that long.
High-Value Literary Devices
Students should be familiar with foreshadowing and suspense. How often has your reading experience been ruined because you weren’t sure if an event counted as a complication or the climax? Foreshadowing and suspense, however, are staples of pop culture, and they show up frequently in ELA curriculum.
All students should know the terms protagonist and antagonist, and in AP Literature (and even PreAP) especially, it’s helpful to recognize if a character is dynamic. Beyond that, however, a student can manage a pretty solid description of a character even if they don’t know all the correct labels, and this is really all they need to be able to do.
Point of view is worth discussing: all students need to be aware of the perspective from which a story is being told. AP students should be able to identify the three main types to pick up a couple points on the exam: first-person, third-person limited (and label to whom it is limited), and third-person omniscient. If you’re really ambitious, you could throw in second-person, but it’s probably not necessary. Beyond that? Understanding the perspective and its impact on the meaning of a text is far more important than correctly being able to label a page of examples.
A Quick Reference List
The most helpful literary devices to actually be able to identify are imagery and figurative language. Even figurative language has its heavy hitters, however: if your students can identify and discuss simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, and symbolism, they’ll be in pretty good shape. Be sure, however, that you get to the point of discussing how these devices reinforce the meaning of the text: if students only know how to identify them, there isn’t much point in knowing the terms aside from an occasional multiple-choice question.
Irony is a worthwhile literary device to camp out on for a while. Not only does missing irony tend to lead to misinterpretation of a text, but all students are likely to encounter irony. It’s all over TV, movies, and social media, even if students never pick up a book again once they leave your class.
If you’re teaching AP Literature, it’s worth making sure students understand the sonnet form. There is almost always an exam question asking them to identify a sonnet, but form also relates to structure so closely that it can be an aid in helping students to understand the poem.
Unless you really love poetry or are teaching a creative writing class, sound devices are probably more hassle than they are worth, in our experience. It’s certainly worth introducing students to the terms, but they can be really challenging for students (and teachers) to understand, especially rhythm and meter, and the likelihood that they carry the meaning of a text is very small.
If you’d like to hear more about how we handled all the miscellaneous “stuff” that comes with teaching English, check out this podcast. Consider paring down your literary devices list or coming up with a “must teach” list in your PLC! And we fully admit: we’re AP Literature teachers through and through, so rhetoric has never been our forte – AP Language teachers, reach out and tell us what we’ve missed!