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Question

Difficulty: EasyLiterary Devices, Diction, and Style in Prose

Pair each short prose excerpt on the left with the correct literary device or feature of diction it demonstrates on the right.

  • The old village chief told the gathered youths the cautionary tale a million times before they finally listened.Hyperbole
  • The restless sea roared angrily against the jagged cliffs throughout the stormy night.Personification
  • And the rain fell, and the rivers overflowed, and the bridges washed away, and the town was submerged.Polysyndeton
  • The wealthy cocoa farmer hired fifty extra hands to help harvest the vast plantation.Synecdoche

Answer

Excerpt 1 matches Hyperbole; Excerpt 2 matches Personification; Excerpt 3 matches Polysyndeton; Excerpt 4 matches Synecdoche.
Each excerpt contains a distinct stylistic device: intentional overstatement represents hyperbole; giving human emotion to the sea represents personification; repeated use of the conjunction 'and' represents polysyndeton; and referring to whole workers by their 'hands' represents synecdoche.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze Excerpt 1 for figurative language.
Identified 'a million times' as an extreme overstatement.
Exaggeration for rhetorical effect without literal truth is hyperbole.
2
Examine the description of non-human elements in Excerpt 2.
The sea is described as roaring 'angrily'.
Giving human characteristics to non-human entities is personification.
3
Observe the sentence structure and conjunction patterns in Excerpt 3.
Frequent repetition of the coordinating conjunction 'and'.
The repeated use of conjunctions in close succession is polysyndeton.
4
Identify the relationship between 'hands' and 'laborers' in Excerpt 4.
'Hands' refers to whole human workers.
Using a part of something to refer to the whole object or person is synecdoche.

Key Concept

Identification of Literary Devices and Stylistic Features in Prose
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Topics

Literary Devices, Diction, and Style in Prose

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