Writer’s Craft
Review
Writer’s Craft Techniques
 Simile
 Metaphor
 Personification
 Hyperbole
 Alliteration
 Onomatopoeia
 Power
of three
 Repetition
Which style strategy is used?

“I looked down at the bee jar still clutched in
my hand and saw a teaspoon of teardrops
floating in the bottom. I unfastened the
window screen and poured it out. The wind
lifted it on her skirt tails and shook it over the
blistering grass.”
--pg 40, Sue Monk Kidd's "The Secret Life
of Bees"
Which style strategy is used?
"In the moonlight, her pale skin glows white
as a bone."
Pg. 373
-A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray
Which style strategy is used?
"I open my eyes again and I know what I
have to do. I look around, my heart a
jackhammer in my chest, blood thickening
in my eyes.“
-Khaled Hossein's The Kite
Runner, page 345
Which style strategy is used?
"A moment after that we heard the
THWOCK-THWOCK-THWOCKof a helicoter's
rotors thrashing furiously at the thin air."
Pg. 263
Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air
Which style strategy is used?
"The rest of the kids in my class were trying
to figure out which way they were going,
but my dad had taught me how to cut
back against the grain, how to reverse
fields, how to straight-arm tacklers."
-Gym Candy by Carl Deuker, p. 7
Which style strategy is used?
"All the anger whistles out of me like I'm a
popped balloon."
Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
p. 74
Which style strategy is used?
“I pretended I was reading from the book, flipping
pages regularly, but I had abandoned the text
altogether, taken over the story, and made up my
own. Hassan, of course, was oblivious to this. To him,
the words on the page were a scramble of codes,
indecipherable, mysterious. Words were secret
doorways and I held all the keys.”
-Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, page 30)
Which style strategy is used?
"I dive into the stream of fourth-period lunch
students and swim down the hall to the
cafeteria."
-Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson,
page 7.
Which style strategy is used?
"He made our country boys look like the
hand-me-down socks Mama brought
home, all full of their darns and mends.”
-Page 4
-The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver
Which style strategy is used?
"While thinking this, I was startled by a
sudden clang! clang! clang! followed by
music."
Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
Which style strategy is used?
"I started throwing up a ton of water and
food. If there was a forest fire somewhere all
they would have to do is hold me over it an
I would have put it out! I threw up and
coughed and choked and vomited about
a million times, and all this just because I'd
breathed in some air!"
Christopher Paul Curtis, The Watsons Go to
Birmingham-1963, p. 178
Which style strategy is used?
 "Finally
I walked to the window and gazed
at the peach trees stretching halfway to
North Carolina, the way they held up their
leafy arms in gestures of pure
beseeching.”
-pg 40, Sue Monk Kidd's "The Secret
Life of Bees"
Which style strategy is used?
"And I can't stop crying now because this was
my one chance to be a man and bring home
the money the telegram boy never brought
from my father. I can't stop crying because i
don't know what Mr.Hannon is going to do on
Monday morning when he has no one to help
him pull the bags into the houses. I can't stop
crying because of the way he is with that horse
he calls sweet because he's so gentle himself..."
Angela's Ashes, By: Frank McCourt, pg. 265
Which style strategy is used?
""Rowdy and I played one-on-one for hours.
We played until dark. We played until the
streetlights lit up the court. We played until
the bats swooped down at our heads. We
played until the moon was huge and
golden and perfect in the dark sky. We
didn't keep score."
-Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary
of a Part-Time Indian, page 230
Which style strategy is used?
"It would have taken a lumberjack ten
minutes to cut down all the trees in Kansas.”
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, pg 12
Which style strategy is used?
“I was strong. I was pure. I was like the
wind.”
Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (Page 58)
Which style strategy is used?
"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp,
which has turned my life into one long night, seven
times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I
forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of
the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of
smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget
those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never
shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me,
for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget
those moments which murdered my God and my soul
and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget
these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as
God Himself. Never." (Elie Wiesel, Night, page 34)