Polishing your writing skills

Autumn 🍂 with its long and cosy evenings is a perfect time for polishing your writing skills. You’ve probably heard of literary techniques at school. They are a great way to take your writing to another level.

While everybody knows what anecdotes, metaphors, and foreshadowing are, you might not have heard of those three creative writing devices:

Asyndeton – leaving out conjunctions like and, but, or, for, and nor. The purpose is a rhythmic emphasis, like in this sentence by Abraham Lincoln: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the Earth.”

Exposition — a literary device used to introduce background information about the story in a matter-of-fact way. Many authors use dialogue or other tricks to convey this information, but some just go straight to the point, just like Tolkien did while describing hobbits.

Tmesis — from the Greek word meaning “to cut,” tmesis is a literary device that cuts a word or phrase into two parts by inserting a word in between them. Just like Eliza Doolittle’s “Fan-bloody-tastic!” Barney in How I Met Your Mother saying “Legend-wait-for-it-dary”.

These techniques will help you enrich your story and make your writing more fly. After all, they have been used by the most successful writers, so go for it! đź’Ş

Do you know any other interesting literary techniques? Share in the comments đź’¬

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