Intensity

Style describes how a writer writes, i.e., their "voice" as a writer. Four elements come together to define a writer's style: tone (a speaker's attitude toward a subject), imagery (vivid descriptions a reader can easily imagine), diction (word choice), and syntax (sentence structure, order, and arrangement). These four elements combine to create two types of stylistic devices: figures of speech (which play with sound, wording, structure, and phrasing) and figures of thought (which play with underlying ideas, perspectives, or arguments of a thought regardless of how it is phrased). These devices fall into seven categories based on their function:

Analogy: Operates on comparison and association
Intensity: Operates on degree, scale, and emotional weight
Sonance: Operates on sound, phonetics, and word shifts
Opposition: Operates on contrast and conflicting ideas
Irony: Operates on gaps between expectation and reality
Patterning: Operates on structural order, arrangement, and repetition
Indirectness: Operates on circumlocution and multi-word groupings

Beyond using devices, a writer's style can echo and reference other stories and styles through intertextuality. When a story's style synthesizes with its setting, it creates a specific emotional atmosphere for the reader--it's mood.

Section Outline: Intensity1. Introduction to Intensity (Emotional Weight & Scale)

Core Concepts:
- Intensity: The rhetorical volume, emphasis, scale, and emotional force applied to an idea.
- Denotation: The dictionary definition or literal meaning of a word.
- Connotation: The emotional, cultural, or associative charge attached to a word that dials its intensity up or down.

2. Amplification (Turning Up the Scale & Volume)

Core Mechanics: Heightening, exaggerating, or stacking phrasing to maximize emotional impact, outrage, or dramatic scale.
Exaggeration & Impossibility:
- Hyperbole: Bold, deliberate exaggeration used for emphasis or effect ("I've told you a million times").
- Adynaton: Hyperbole taken to the extreme of physical impossibility to emphasize total futility ("Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle").
Redundancy & Outbursts:
- Pleonasm: Using more words than necessary to express an idea, adding dramatic weight or insistence ("I saw it with my own eyes").
- Bdelygmia: A concentrated, overwhelming outburst of violent insult, condemnation, or invective.

3. Reduction (Turning Down the Scale & Directness)

Core Mechanics: Minimizing, softening, or masking the harshness or scale of a statement to lessen impact, maintain decorum, or heighten subtext.
Minimization & Negation:
- Understatement (Meiosis): Intentionally portraying something as far smaller, less important, or less intense than it really is.
- Litotes: A specific form of understatement that affirms a positive statement by negating its opposite ("She's not bad at all", "It was no small task").
Substitution & Veiling:
- Euphemism: Replacing a blunt, harsh, or taboo term with a milder, more polite alternative ("passed away" for died).
- Dysphemism: Replacing a neutral or mild term with a intentionally harsh, crude, or offensive one ("croaked" for died).
- Covert Veiling (Innuendo & Double Entendre): Using veiled or suggestive phrasing to downplay a direct or taboo assertion while implying its true meaning.

4. Implication (Saying Everything by Saying Nothing)

Core Mechanics: Generating intense emotional weight or rhetorical power by deliberately withholding, stopping short, or pretending to omit key ideas.
Structural Silences & Unfinished Thoughts:
- Aposiopesis: Stopping mid-sentence and leaving a thought unfinished due to overwhelming passion, fear, or emotion ("If you say that again, I swear I'll—").
- Anapodoton: Intentionally dropping the second main clause of a well-known conditional statement, forcing the listener's mind to supply the implied consequence ("When in Rome...", "If you know what's good for you...").
Calculated Pretense:
- Apophasis: Bringing up a subject while explicitly claiming not to mention it ("I won't even bring up my opponent's terrible attendance record...").

"Like taking candy from a baby."

An analogy is any comparison of two things for the purposes of clarity or an example. Logical analogies act like mathematical equations: gloves are to hands as socks are to feet (or, in the Greek summation of Plato, gloves : hands :: socks : feet).

Literary analogies are more varied. Below are different types of analogies used in both narrative storytelling and rhetorical argument.

METAPHOR & SIMILE: Comparing perspective

Let's start with a simple comparison and take two different things and say they are alike:

"My love is like a red, red rose."

"My hate is deeper than the ocean and more violent."

"The hills are as pretty as a painting."

All of these are similes, which take two ideas and show how they are alike. Love and flowers both bloom. Hate and oceans both are immense. Landscapes and paintings are both beautiful. It's easy to tell a simile: all of them use the word "like," "as," or "than" in their phrasing.

But what about comparisons where the connection is a bit more extensive?

"His heart is a lion."

"Her mind is a steel trap."

"My father is a total dictator when it comes to my dating life."

Both hearts and lions are tough... and fierce and can race and are not something to trifle with. Her mind and a steel trap are both sharp, reliable, reactive, and ready to snap at any moment. Daddy isn't just controlling like a dictator: he uses fear to get his way, prioritizes his own self interest over that of the next generation, and disguises his cruelty under a mask of paternal affection.

Similes show how two things are alike through one point of comparison. Metaphors show how the two things are so similar in so many ways that they are equivalent... figuratively. Unless the girl's father staged a military coup to autocratically rule a nation with an armed junta, he is clearly not an actual dictator. However, the equivalence redefines the father so the reader sees all the qualities of a dictator in him.

How does this work? Metaphors have two parts: the tenor and the vehicle. The tenor is the subject of comparison (heart, mind, father), and the vehicle is the thing it is said to also be (lion, steel trap, dictator) that drives the metaphor.* Think of the tenor as something literal in the room**--the heart, mind, and father are things we could (but really shouldn't) stab a pencil into--and the vehicle is reinterpretation of that literal thing. The vehicle makes the reader view the tenor differently, but the reverse cannot be said.

*While the tenor is the subject of the metaphor, it isn't always the subject of a sentence (though it does precede the vehicle in most constructions). If I were to say A dictator in every way, my father forbade me from even talking to a boy if he wasn't present, father is still the tenor even though the word dictator precedes it.

**Yes, it could be an abstract idea and not a physical thing. Just set semantics aside for a moment for the sake of the analogy I'm making.

ALLEGORY: Comparing meaning

Speaking of meaning, sometimes an entire text sticks to a specific metaphor. These are called allegories, and allegory gives a story multiple levels of meaning. On the surface are the plot and the characters in the text, yet further analysis reveals a secondary story. Allegories are used by authors to convey a political, historical, philosophical, or moral point in a simple and digestible way.

One of the oldest allegories is Plato's Allegory of the Cave, where he explains the idea of the perspective of physical actuality. The idea that reality could be illusory is mind-bending and hard to conceive, so Plato compares it to a cave where men have no idea what objects look like, only their shadows. After living his entire life believing shadows are real, one man breaks out of the cave, sees the actual objects, and realizes the shadows were illusions. He then steps out of the cave and into the sun to discover the ultimate truth of his situation. The story breaks down Plato's abstract point about reality in a way any person can understand.

Another well-known allegory is George Orwell's Animal Farm. It is a political and historical allegory, taking the events of the Russian Revolution and early Soviet state and setting them on a farm. Animal Farm is a special kind of allegory called an apologue, which uses anthropomorphized animals to tell a story with a specific lesson. Orwell's political apologue was an effort to teach readers that greed can destroy positive social reform if left unchecked (many people believe the lesson was that communism is bad, but Orwell, a staunch socialist, believed communism failed in Russia due to Stalin's greed).

Note that allegories compare the meaning between the two stories, not the structure. If a story symbolizes a real-life chain of events, that's allegory, but if it structurally mirrors another text, that's intertextuality. Take the film The Great Dictator: with its mustached leader of Tormania invading Osturlich, it is a clear allegory for the rise of Adolf Hitler and his invasion of Austria. Knowing this informs the story's meaning. However, the film is also filled with gags and timing that specifically allude to the Marx Brothers: this is a type of intertextuality called homage, and while knowing the connection to the Marx Brothers may be interesting, it does not change the core meaning of the text.

METONYMY: Comparison by association

Metonymy is where one idea is substituted for a closely associated idea. In the sentence The White House put pressure on Hollywood to censor films, a reader wouldn't assume that a building in Washington, DC, literally gave orders to a town in California. Instead, they would understand that White House is a metonym for the Executive branch of government and specifically the US President, and that Hollywood is a metonym for the film industry. Here, the analogous comparison happens entirely in the reader's mind.

At least, it does if they know the context. Metonymy can become ineffective if the reader has no background knowledge on the topic. If the response to the earlier example was Above-the-line talent refused Hays Office mandates, a reader would need to know an industry term (above-the-line is a metonym used to describe those at the top of a film's call sheet--namely, the director, producers, and lead actors) and a historical term (the Hays Office was a metonym for the Motion Picture Production Code, first created and enforced by US Postmaster William Hays).

There are different subsets of metonyms. Synecdoche is when a part represents its whole: She's a total brain means the girl in question is very intelligent, as her brain is the most representative part of her. Toponyms are metonyms where a city's name represents a major group or industry inside that city: in Detroit is suffering with the latest air-bag recall, Detroit is a toponym representing the American auto industry as a whole, which is centered in Detroit.

Just as toponyms can replace the names of locations, antonomasia replaces the names of specific people entirely—for example, The Bard of Avon is William Shakespeare, Old Kinderhook is President Martin Van Buren, and the dark knight is Batman. The reverse of this kind of metonymy is epithet, when a descriptive phrase is added to a name to make it notable, e.g., Honest Abe, Ivan the Terrible, Weird Al Yankovic, and America the beautiful.

Another metonymic device is a kenning, a short two-word description that replaces a common noun to add action and imagery to a sentence.** Instead of psychiatrist, I can say that I went to my head shrinker. Instead of an accountant, I can say that The bean-counter said I spend too much money on Lego minifig blind bags. Instead of avalanche, I can say:

The white death buried them all—no one could escape the snow and storm.

There's clearly a kenning--calling the avalanche white death--but isn't there a typo too? Shouldn't the speaker say snowy storm?

That's no typo--it's hendiadys, another type of metonym where a single idea is expressed through two words linked with a coordinating conjunction. Like a kenning, hendiadys doesn't just add words but imagery too: in Megan liked to toy with her boyfriend, so dating her resulted in peril and pleasure. (instead of the perilous pleasure), the hendiadys makes dating Megan feel more extreme than it hopefully is.***

That last example is also a type of synecdoche is a merism, which uses extreme opposites to show the entire scope of something. He was known near and far, she believed it body and soul, and he could be both Jekyll and Hyde are all examples of merisms. Actually, that last one doubles as both a literary allusion and a merism.

Speaking of literature, fictional characters can become metonyms too. Uncle Tom in Uncle Tom's Cabin, for example, became an Antebellum metonym for every slave that empathized with their master over their own people. 1984's Big Brother became such a successful depiction of a government surveillance state that it the most common metonym for a surveillance state in pop culture. Thanks to metonymy, every lovesick romantic boy is a Romeo, every sweet and optimistic girl is a Pollyanna, and a hater of the Christmas season is a Scrooge or a Grinch.

But what's better than two words? That's right—three words. Hendiatris is the same as hendiadys but expresses an idea through three words linked by a coordinating conjunction. Here are three examples of hendiatris: He wants wine, women, and song (instead of celebration); She wouldn't cheat in any way, shape, or form (instead of manner); and Superman fights for truth, justice, and the American way (instead of good).*****

**Actually, kennings were originally used not to replace words but because there were no words. Kennings are used extensively in Old English texts like Beowulf, The Wanderer, and The Dream of the Rood when English only had a fraction of the word that are in its current lexicon.

***Hendiadys isn't just limited to changing an adjective-noun into noun and noun: a noun can become a verb and verb (The mix and bake should only take twenty minutes) or an adjective and adjective (He finally made it through the rough and tough). However, the replacement of a noun is key: He was nice and warm and She told him to come and get it are not hendiadys, as the words function according to the proper use of adjectives and verbs, respectively.

**** Like hendiadys, three verbs (Glen would miss the snap, dash, and tackle of the weekly game) and three adjectives (Fat, drunk, and stupid are no way to go through life, son) can also replace a noun.

WHELMING: Comparing intensity

All figurative language works off the tension between denotation and connotation. Denotation is the actual definition of a word—the one you could find in a dictionary—while connotation is the conceptual or socially constructed definition that a word invokes in a reader.

Take rat: denotatively, rat refers to a furry mammal with sharp front teeth and a long wormlike tail that lives in burrows and feeds on fruits, insects, or human garbage. Connotatively, rat evokes negative reactions of disgust and fear: rats live in garbage, rats contaminate food, and rats brought the plague. If I were writing a story about a small furry rodent and wanted to avoid these connotations, I would switch to a positively connotative word like mouse.

Tapping into the emotional connotation of words and phrases is a powerful literary technique called whleming. The word whelm comes from an Old English word for being in a suddenly overturned vessel and becoming engulfed in water. Whelming in writing should do the same but with words: throw the reader suddenly into a deep pool of emotion.

To overwhelm a reader or character, writers commonly use hyperbole, which is to make something bigger or more important for effect. I feel as big as a house, the whole world was laughing at me, and she'd lose her head if it wasn't bolted on are all examples of hyperbole. With hyperbole, a reader isn't just floating in a deep pool—they're drowning. One common type of hyperbole is adynaton, which is a declaration of impossibility as an obviously exaggerated comparison: You've got as much chance with her as I have of becoming president is an example of adynaton.

There is also the opposite of overwhelming with hyperbole: underwhelming with understatement. Understatement, called meiosis by the Greeks, is to make something smaller or less important for effect. Saying it's not a big deal…only a fatal wound or I'm pretty okay with Sheila dating my best friend and ripping my heart out are examples of understatement. Understatement is a function of circumlocution, or trying to talk around a subject instead of literally stating it. To continue our metaphor, understatement doesn't mean the pool is empty—the speaker is telling you the pool is empty despite it being very much full.

JUXTAPOSITION: Comparing neighbors

Often, understatement uses litotes, a type of solecism where the writer creates a double negative statement. For example, a character saying she's not unattractive is different than saying she's attractive—in fact, the use of understatement here is specifically avoiding the positive phrasing, leading the reader to understand that, while the speaker doesn't find the woman unattractive, it's questionable if the speaker does find the woman attractive.

Litotes only make sense due to the principle of juxtaposition, a syntactical concept where two or more ideas are placed side by side to illustrate a comparison or contrast. It is only because two negatives sit side by side that a reader understands that it is actually a positive. Juxtaposed analogies stand apart from other analogies because they more closely resemble figures of speech rather than figures of thought (though they are without a doubt figures of thought).

The simplest and most common type of juxtaposition is the juxtaposition of two words that are inherently opposites, which creates an oxymoron. Phrases like open secret, civil war, jumbo shrimp, acting naturally, living dead, alone together, and Hell's Angels are all inherently contradictory but, because of their placement together, are able to create an interesting idea from the contrast. An open secret, for instance, is a secret because it's scandalous and shouldn't be known, but it's also open because everyone knows it anyway.

MORPHISM: Comparing forms

Another type of comparison happens when a writer takes a person, animal, plant, object, or abstract concept and plays with the nature of their existence. Here's how it works: say I want my protagonist Stella, who just got the phone number from the guy she likes, to feel like the world is celebrating with her. I could write, "The dried autumn leaves danced too—dozens of jubilant pirouettes lined the sidewalk stretched before Stella like dance lines at a parade. The soft wind choreographing the tableau caressed Stella's ear and echoed her sigh of relief: whew, whew, whew."

Here, the leaves are characterized as dancers to contribute to Stella's feelings of joy—they can't literally dance or do a pirouette, but that's how Stella and the narrator interpret it. Similarly, wind can blow, tickle, and even creep, but caressing and echoing are agentic words that imply that the actions are done with conscious intention. But there's no real confusion by the reader because humans tend to see things from a human perspective. In our own lives, we often compare nonhuman objects and creatures to ourselves by giving them human motivations and actions. This is... NOT PERSONIFICATION.

I know, I know. One of your English teachers long ago got this wrong. We aren't perfect—it happens. The correct term for the attribution of qualities that are exclusively human to that which is not human is actually called anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is a cornerstone of how humans see the world because many of the stories we encounter as children use animals who think, talk, move, and dress like humans: Winnie the Pooh, Bluey, Mr. Toad, the uptight rabbit and drugged-out worm in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, etc. Anthropomorphism works off the concept of analogy: if an writer writes the lion commanded his troops with a loud roar, our understanding of troops and commanders allows us to interpret the lion as the leader in charge.

So what then is personification? Personification is the depiction of an abstract concept as a person—not just any human but a character with a defined personality. When we say Justice is blind, that's personification. When Emily Dickinson said she could not stop for Death but Death kindly stopped for her, that's personification. When someone retorts that Misery loves company, that's personification. While common in literature, personification is even more common in religious studies, as polytheistic cultures tend to have their different gods embody different abstract concepts. Take the ancient Greek as an example: Apollo was the god of light and enlightenment, Athena was the god of wisdom and strategy, Aphrodite was the god of love and beauty, Zeus was the god of infidelity and constantly making the situation worse, and so on.

Now, not every god in ancient Greece was human-like. Pan, for instance, was the god of wilderness and was depicted as a goat with a man's face and torso. Zeus himself could transform into a swan, an eagle, a snake, and a bull whenever he wanted to hide from his wife. Taking abstract ideas and putting them into animal form instead of human form is called theriomorphism and is a type of zoomorphism. Just as anthropomorphism gives qualities that are exclusively human to that which is not human, zoomorphism gives qualities that are animalistic in nature to that which is not an animal (which, for the purposes of literature, humans are not). For example, in Tom pawed at his date all night, but she wouldn't bite, "pawed" is zoomorphism that characterizes Tom as an animal who keeps awkwardly touching his date to get attention, as animals are the only things with paws.

What about "bite"—would that be zoomorphism too? While there are plenty of qualities that are uniquely human or uniquely animal, there are a lot of things that both humans and animals can do: jump, swim, fight, sleep, and yes, bite. But guess what can't bite? A rock. So what is it called if I were to say I watched the rocks bite into the sidewall of the tire and felt it go flat—anthropomorphism or zoomorphism? Neither—this is a pathetic fallacy. The pathetic fallacy refers to giving an inanimate object the action of a living thing. The clock dove off the shelf, the flame danced on the candle's end, and the sea fought against the base of the cliff are examples of the pathetic fallacy, as both people and animals can dive, dance, and fight.

So what's the opposite of the pathetic fallacy—instead of treating an object as if it were alive, the writer treats something alive as if it were an object? This is objectification (NB: While some European scholars and corners of the internet have begun to call this chremamorphism, that term is nonstandard and lacks widespread acceptance despite being a really cool word). Her plaster smile was starting to crack or the dog's batteries ran out after the run in the park are two examples of objectification.

IDIOMS: When analogies go mainstream

You may have noticed that some of the examples in the preceding sections are familiar. My love is like a red, red rose. I'm so embarrassed I could die. The clock stared at me. She ate humble pie. It's raining cats and dogs.

These are idioms. Idioms are well-known phrases that have a figurative meaning that's clear and can be applied to many situations. Idioms tend to be regional and passed down through common use: while most of the United States hasn't heard the phrase "the devil must be beating his wife," it's a popular idiom in the Southern US for a sunshower (when the sun is shining while it's raining)—the idiom is popular there but hasn't spread because sunshowers are common in the South but rare elsewhere. While most idioms are learned from hearing others use them, many texts use idioms to reflect common speech, and some popular books, plays, and poems have even coined idioms.

One popular type of idiom writers use is an aphorism, or an idiom that conveys a universal truth. There are all types of aphorisms:

adages (also called proverbs or saws), which are passed down through generations because they contain a wise truth (a stitch in time saves nine; a rising tide lifts all boats; great minds think alike but fools rarely differ)
apophthegms, which are cynical aphorisms that convey a pessimistic truth (a fool and his money are soon parted; good fences make good neighbors; eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we shall die)
maxims, which are aphorisms specifically discussing human behavior (don't judge a book by its cover, look before you leap, don't count your chickens before they hatch)
mantras, which are religious or mystical aphorisms that are ceremonially repeated (baruch atah adonai, Mother Mary full of grace)
mottos, which are like mantras for corporations (just do it, the snack that smiles back)

Notice that aphorisms do not include axioms, which are literal principles as opposed to figurative idioms (examples of axioms include quality over quantity, you are what you eat, and Rome wasn't built in a day). Aphorisms are also different from epigrams, which are memorable, witty, or revelatory sayings that become well-known but are not repeated as common sayings. When Eleanor Roosevelt said, “It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness," or Winston Churchill said, "If you're going through hell, keep going," or when Vince Lombardi said, "Winners never quit and quitters never win," they were speaking in epigrams.*

*Notice that these witty sayings all have a traceable author and usually appear in poetry or speeches. Typically, epigrams are used by speech writers or are included in texts as epigraphs, which are short lines of quoted text that come before a book or chapter which comment on the nature of the book or chapter.

Sometimes these idioms are used so much that people start to dislike them. An idiom that has become so overused that it has lost its original meaning or effect is a cliché: Kiss and make up. Cat got your tongue? His eyes twinkled. She was brave as a line. Read between the lines. Every cloud has a silver lining. Typically, writers try to avoid cliches or only have ignorant characters use them to point out how tacky that character is.

However, cliches can be occasionally useful to a writer. Platitudes occur when a cliché is twisted into something ironic or new, thereby giving the cliché a new meaning. When Sherlock Holmes says, "There is method in my madness," we yawn, as ever since Shakespeare (who coined the phrase in Hamlet), the cliché has meant that what looks chaotic and crazy is actually well planned—but if The Joker uses this phrase, it's an interesting platitude, as one of The Joker's defining character traits is that he is all madness and never plans.

Another way of bringing new meaning to a cliche is by using a snowclone, which is a cliche with parts that can be substituted. I’m not a X, but I play one on TV; X is the new Y; X or bust; and Have X—will travel are all common snowclones, as they take the original cliché phrases (I'm not a doctor but I play one on TV, pink is the new black, Oregon or bust, have gun--will travel) and make them interesting again (I'm not a giant radioactive monster but I play one on TV, quiet is the new loud, Mars or bust, have tuxedo—will travel).

There are also perverbs (from "perverted proverbs," also called antiproverbs), which switch around parts of cliches to create irony and form a pun. Instead of there's method to my madness, I could say there's madness to my method. Instead of saying where there's a will, there's a way, I could say where there's a will, there's a lawsuit. Instead of saying that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, I could say an onion a day keeps everyone away.

FOOTNOTES:

INTENSITY