Content Writing

91 Literary Devices to Give Your Writing More Wow Factor

You already encounter literary devices day in and day out. Here are clear definitions so you can leverage them and sharpen up your prose.

Literary devices give your writing more style, and they can be used in many different genres and publishing formats. (Image via layers feature in Canva)

Want to become a champion with words? Study how the ancient Greeks and Romans did it.

A literary device is a tool used by authors and copywriters to give their writing a twist. Literary devices — and their spoken counterpart, rhetorical devices — help you create tension, explain complex ideas and communicate vivid imagery. Sometimes, tweaking a single word or phrase is all it takes to take your writing from drab to fab.

Literary and rhetorical devices date all the way back to ancient times, when students studied rhetoric as part of their foundational education. This education was called the Trivium, and rhetoric is the third of the Trivium’s three disciplines; the first two disciplines are grammar (learning about a topic) and logic (learning how to interrogate a topic). Think of rhetoric as learning how to articulate a topic.

The point of studying rhetoric was to learn how to persuade. And persuasion is often what we’re trying to achieve in writing and marketing, whether that be to convince…