![]() We see this in everyday conversation all the time. It’s also an effective tool for eliciting those same emotions in your audience.Įven relatively basic feelings can be elevated by hyperbole. Hyperbole is great for showing strong emotion among characters. Here are some ways this common literary device is used in literature: Hyperbole can elevate feelings We’ll look at some hyperbole examples from literature later on so you can see what others have done. Instead, hyperbole is a way of helping us to better understand your overall narrative. So while hyperbole can help elevate emotion or craft effective comedy beats, those two things shouldn’t be your end goal as a writer. At the same time, the writer is using exaggeration to emphasize just how cheap this particular character is.Īs with other figures of speech, though, the golden rule of hyperbole is that it should help move your plot along. You might use hyperbole as part of a simile, saying “He’s tighter with his money than a rubber band wrapped around a leaky bottle of superglue.” The extreme exaggeration is meant to be funny to the reader, as over-the-top imagery. In many cases, good hyperbole is capable of doing both at the same time.įor instance, imagine you want to tell readers how cheap and thrifty a character really is. While hyperbole is a very versatile literary device, its primary purpose is either to bring humor to a story, or to emphasize a point the writer wishes to make. Specifically, it can replace more boring and shopworn phrases with something much more memorable! The purpose of hyperbole in writing In your own stories, selective use of hyperbole as a rhetorical device can do the same thing. But the statement easily conveys the idea that they could eat a lot of anything in a much more evocative way than if he’d simply said “I’m so hungry.” We’ve all heard at least one person in their lives talk about being “so hungry I could eat a horse.” Logically, the person’s stomach couldn’t contain an entire horse, and horsemeat probably isn’t their first choice. One of the reasons that this figure of speech is so effective in writing is that hyperbole is a major part of our everyday conversations. In fact, the word “hyperbole” comes from the Greek word “huperbole,” which means “to throw above.” Hyperbole adds comedic moments to a story, enhances sarcasm, and can even lend your characters a mythic flair in dramatic writing. Hyperbole is a specialized type of literary device that uses exaggerated statements in order to enhance certain narrative effects on the reader. But in the wrong hands, hyperbole can make both your characters and your stories seem like a joke.īut what is hyperbole? What role does it serve in writing, and how can you use it the right way? Keep reading to discover the definition of this classic literary device, along with some helpful hyperbole example from literature and everyday speech. ![]() ![]() In the right hands, writers can use hyperbole to create memorable quotes and iconic characters. ![]()
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