When someone asks you the effect on the reader, they are asking you what a particular piece of language makes you think, feel, or experience. This should be something that you weren’t thinking, feeling, or experiencing before you started reading: a book about a particular war might make you think differently about that war for the rest of your life; a story about something happy might make you feel a little brighter than you did that morning; an article about how all the little bones in your hand function might make you more aware of the tiny movements of each bone in your own hand as you type or write for the next hour.
Once you have worked out what your writer wants you to think, feel, or experience, you need to work out how they have tried to do this. This is where language and structural devices come in.
Let’s go back to our poor dog, splashing and struggling in the sea. Will someone eventually see him and save him?
Let’s look at the sentence I just wrote. Did it make you think feel, or experience anything? Perhaps not – but what do you think I wanted you to feel? Can you spot anything that might have been chosen to make you hopeful, sympathetic, or able to hear the sound of the dog in the water? If this was the quote you were asked to analyse, you might pick out the following things:
Rhetorical question – Did you notice that I used a question mark to create a rhetorical question? I was trying to make you think about who could save the dog, and how they might notice him there in the water. I was trying to encourage you to feel hopeful that this would happen.
Emotive language – Perhaps you noticed that I used the adjective ‘poor’ and the verb ‘struggling’. These are examples of emotive word choice, designed to make you feel sympathetic towards the dog. As humans, we generally care about people and animals that are in danger, so these words are designed to tug on your heart strings and feel sorry for this creature.
Alliteration and onomatopoeia – You might notice, if you read it aloud, that I used a lot of words that begin with the letter ‘s’, including the homophones ‘sea’ and ‘see’. This is a particular type of alliteration that creates the effect of ‘sibilance’ – a sort of hissing sound that could mimic the sound of the waves splashing as the dog tries to swim. I also used the onomatopoeia word ‘splashing’ with its powerful ‘sh’ sound to help you hear the struggle even more clearly.
If you are unsure of any of these language devices, you can sign up for a Get My Grades subscription to gain access to all our literary device Learn pages, which are full of information and advice about how to spot and use devices like the ones we’ve just looked at.
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