Literary Elements

AP prompts will often give you the particular literary elements they wish for you to treat in your essays. Sometimes, though, they will only provide a general prompt and then expect that you will use literary elements as you address that question.

DIDLS: The common literary elements have often been named using the acronym DIDLS, which refers to these elements:

• Diction—the connotation of the word choice
• Images—vivid appeals to understanding through the senses—concrete language
• Details—facts that are included or those that are omitted
• Language—the overall use of language, such as formal, clinical, jargon
• Syntax—how sentence structure affects the reader's attitude

Diction (word choice)
Laugh: guffaw, chuckle, titter, giggle, cackle, snicker, roar
Self-confident: proud, conceited, egotistical, stuck-up, haughty, smug, condescending
House: home, hut, shack, mansion, cabin, home, residence
Old: mature, experienced, antique, relic, senior, ancient
Fat: obese, plump, corpulent, portly, porky, burly, husky, full-figured

Images
The use of vivid descriptions or figures of speech that appeal to sensory experiences helps to create the author’s tone.
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun. (restrained)
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king. (somber, candid)
He clasps the crag with crooked hands. (dramatic)
Love sets you going like a fat gold watch. (fanciful)
Smiling, the boy fell dead. (shocking)

Details
Details are most commonly the facts given by the author or speaker as support for the attitude or tone.
The speaker’s perspective shapes what details are given.

Language
Consider language to be the entire body of words used in a text, not simply isolated bits of diction.
For example, an invitation to a wedding might use formal language, while a biology text would use scientific and clinical language.
—When I told Dad that I had goofed the exam, he blew his top. (slang)
—I had him on the ropes in the fourth and if one of my short rights had connected, he’d have gone down for the count. (jargon)
—A close examination and correlation of the most reliable current economic indexes justifies the conclusion that the next year will witness a continuation of the present, upward market trend. (turgid, pedantic)

Syntax
How a sentence is constructed affects what the audience understands.
The inverted order of an interrogative sentence cues the reader to a question and creates tension between speaker and listener.
Short sentences are often emphatic, passionate or flippant, whereas longer sentences suggest greater thought.
Sentence structure affects tone.

Other Literary Elements are as crucial as those named in DIDLS. These include

Tone
Good authors are rarely monotone. A speaker’s attitude can shift on a topic, or an author might have one attitude toward the audience and another toward the subject. The following are some clues to watch for shifts in tone:
—key words (but, yet, nevertheless, however, although)
—punctuation (dashes, periods, colons)
—paragraph divisions
—changes in sentence length
—sharp contrasts in diction

Argument
The forms of argument used by a writer will often be the subject of AP prompts. Use your knowledge of rhetorical analysis to deal with the forms of argument. Remember first the classical definition of rhetoric: the art of finding the best available means of persuasion. These means, according to the Greek rhetoricians, were logos (the logical appeal), ethos (the ethical appeal) and pathos (the pathetic or emotional appeal).