Literary devices you can practise, not just name Eight of them. Each with an example and a ten-minute exercise. One you can try right here.

A literary device is a name for something a sentence does. Naming it is easy. Doing it is the skill, and you build it the same way you build any skill: short, often, with a rule that removes the easy way out.

Each device below has an example and an exercise with a rule. In Type Write Now the machine enforces the rule. A lipogram ties the key down. A pangram is not done until every letter is struck. A word limit counts your words. You can try the first one on this page.

A lipogram leaves out one letter, everywhere. The famous ones drop E, the most common letter in English and French. Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby (1939) runs 50,000 words without one. Georges Perec's La Disparition (1969) does it in French, and Gilbert Adair's translation A Void does it in English.

Without E you lose the, he, she, they, were, there and most past tenses. Every sentence has to be found another way. That is the point.

Alliteration repeats the sound a word starts with. It is older than rhyme in English. Old English verse held its lines together with it, and it survives in phrases like safe and sound and bed and breakfast.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things pastWilliam Shakespeare, Sonnet 30

Four S sounds in the first line, then he stops. Overdo it and you get a tongue twister.

Anaphora starts each clause or sentence with the same words. Speeches run on it. So does the most famous opening in English fiction:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859

The repetition sets a rhythm. The part that changes stands out against the part that does not.

Epistrophe is anaphora turned around. The repeated words come at the end, where the ear is waiting for them.

…that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.Abraham Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address, 1863

Each clause builds toward the phrase, and the third time it lands hardest. It works in speeches. In prose it wears out fast unless the phrase earns it.

A univocalic allows one vowel and bans the other four. Christian Bök's Eunoia (2001) gives each vowel its own chapter. Every word in “A” has only A in it. It proves the form can carry real prose.

It teaches you the sound of words. Write with only O and you hear how much of English lives in its vowels.

A pangram uses every letter at least once. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is the one everyone knows. Typists used it for a century because it puts every type bar through its swing. A good pangram is short and still reads like a sentence.

It is also the best finger warm-up there is. Type Write Now starts every day with one.

“Cut your adverbs” is common advice and usually too strong. The useful version is narrower. An adverb ending in -ly often means the verb is wrong. He walked slowly wants to be he ambled, or he trudged, or he dragged himself. Each says something the adverb cannot.

This trains diction: choosing the exact word. Take the crutch away and you have to find the verb.

Sentence length is a device the reader never notices and always feels. A run of long sentences reads like thinking. A short one after them reads like a fact. Writers who control this do it on purpose. You can only do it on purpose if you can write to a length at will.