Literary device

In writing and speaking, a literary device, literary technique, rhetorical device, stylistic device, or trope is any deliberate strategy of using language that an author or orator employs to be more effective at achieving some purpose. This purpose may be: to focus or guide the audience's attention, to make the language or its content memorable, or to evoke a particular emotional, rational, aesthetic, or other response.

Literary devices are classifiable into sub-categories, such as narrative devices, poetic devices, argumentative devices, linguistic schemes or templates, or other techniques distinct to certain forms of language. They can be difficult to cleanly classify, however, as many are common across multiple such forms and can intersect under various categories, such as figures of speech.