In literature and writing, stylistically elements are the use of any of a variety of techniques to give an auxiliary meaning, ideas, or feeling to the literalism or written.
Figurative language
A figure of speech is any way of saying something other than the ordinary way. Figurative language is language using figures of speech.
Simile
The easiest stylistic device to identify is a simile, signaled by the use of the words "like" or "as". A simile is a comparison used to attract the reader's attention and describe something in descriptive terms. Example: "From up here on the fourteenth floor, my brother Charley looks like an insect scurrying among other insects." (from "Sweet Potato Pie," Eugenia Collier) Example: The beast had eyes as big as baseballs and teeth as long as knives. Example: She put her hand to the boy's head, which was steaming like a hot train.
Metaphor
A metaphor is a comparison that does not use the words "like" or "as". Metaphors can span over multiple sentences.
Example: "That boy is like a machine." is a simile but "That boy is a machine!" is a metaphor.
Synecdoche
Synecdoche occurs when a part of something is used to refer to the whole. Many examples of synecdoche are idioms, common to the language. Example: Workers can be referred to as 'pairs of hands', and a vehicle as one's 'wheels'.
Metonymy
Metonymy is similar to synecdoche, but instead of a part representing the whole, a related object or part of a related object is used to represent the whole. Often it is used to represent the whole of an abstract idea. Example: The phrase "The king's guns were aimed at the enemy," using 'guns' to represent infantry. Example: The word 'crown' may be used metonymically to refer to the king or queen, and at times to the law of the land.
Personification
Giving human or animal characteristics to inanimate objects.
Example: The wind whistled through the trees. (Wind cannot whistle, humans whistle.)
Apostrophe
Similar to 'personification' but direct. The speaker addresses someone absent or dead, or addresses an inanimate or abstract object as if it were human.
Charactonym
This is when the name of a character has a symbolic meaning. For example, in Dickens' Great Expectations, Miss Havisham has a sham or lives a life full of pretense. In Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Rev. Dimmesdale metaphorically fades away (dims) as the novel progresses, while Chillingworth has a cold (chilled) heart.
Symbol
A symbol may be an object, a person, a situation, an action, a word, or an idea that has literal meaning in the story as well as an alternative identity that represents something else. It is used as an expressive way to depict an idea. The symbol generally conveys an emotional response far beyond what the word, idea, or image itself dictates. Example: A heart standing for love. (One might say "It broke my heart" rather than "I was really upset") Example: A sunrise portraying new hope. ("All their fears melted in the face of the newly risen sun.")
Allegory
An allegory is a story that has a second meaning, usually by endowing characters, objects or events with symbolic significance. The entire story functions symbolically; often a pattern relates each literal item to a corresponding abstract idea or principle. Although the surface story may have its interest, the author's major interest is in the ulterior meaning.
Imagery
This is when the author invokes sensory details. Often, this is simply to draw a reader more deeply into a story by helping the reader visualize what is being described. However, imagery may also symbolize important ideas in a story.
For example, in Saki's "The Interlopers", two men engaged in a generational feud become trapped beneath a fallen tree in a storm: "Ulrich von Gradwitz found himself stretched on the ground, one arm numb beneath him and the other held almost as helplessly in a tight tangle of forked branches, while both legs were pinned beneath the fallen mass." Readers can not only visualize the scene but may infer from it that it is the feud that has trapped him. Note also the diction used within the imagery: words like "forked" and "fallen" imply a kind of hell that he is trapped in.
Motif
When a word, phrase, image, or idea is repeated throughout a work or several works of literature.