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! 💪

Do you know any other interesting literary techniques? Share in the comments 💬