Build the vocabulary examiners expect — fifteen authorial choices you will spot again and again
You do not need to memorise a hundred techniques. Examiners see the same fifteen appearing across almost every IB text. Learn these — their definition and their typical effect on the reader — and you will have the vocabulary for 90% of what you need to say.
Click any technique to reveal its definition, effect, and an example.
What: The author's deliberate word choice — formal vs informal, elevated vs plain, archaic vs modern.
✨ Typical effect: Sets tone, reveals character, signals the author's attitude toward the subject.
Orwell's "our Leader, Comrade Napoleon" — elevated, ritualised diction that exposes the regime's self-flattery.
What: A direct comparison — A is B — without "like" or "as".
✨ Typical effect: Makes abstract ideas concrete; layers meaning; creates imagery.
"Hope is the thing with feathers" — makes the abstract emotion tangible.
What: A comparison using "like" or "as".
✨ Typical effect: Helps the reader visualise; creates unexpected connections between unlike things.
"Her smile was cold as a server room" — makes an abstract feeling suddenly physical.
What: Giving human qualities to non-human things.
✨ Typical effect: Creates emotional connection; makes the non-human feel threatening or comforting.
"The wind whispered" — makes nature feel intimate, almost conspiratorial.
What: An object, colour, or image standing for something larger than itself.
✨ Typical effect: Adds depth; unifies themes; rewards the attentive reader.
The windmill in Animal Farm — symbolises the promise of the revolution, and later, its exploitation.
What: An entire story whose characters and events represent something else — politics, morality, history.
✨ Typical effect: Allows the author to comment on real-world power structures without naming them; invites the reader to decode.
Orwell's Animal Farm — the farm is the USSR; the pigs are the ruling class.
What: The reader knows something a character does not.
✨ Typical effect: Creates tension, pity, or dark humour; positions the reader to judge.
We know the pigs have rewritten the commandments; Boxer still believes "Napoleon is always right". We watch with dread.
What: Saying the opposite of what is meant.
✨ Typical effect: Mocks; reveals the speaker's true attitude; creates distance.
The pigs calling themselves "Comrades" while eating at the farmer's table — the revolutionary word becomes a costume.
What: Placing two contrasting images, ideas, or words side by side.
✨ Typical effect: Highlights difference; forces the reader to compare; intensifies both elements.
Orwell juxtaposes the animals' hunger with the pigs' milk and apples — the reader cannot unsee the contrast.
What: Deliberate exaggeration for effect.
✨ Typical effect: Intensifies emotion; overwhelms the reader; can amplify humour or horror.
"I have told you a thousand times" — everyday hyperbole; in literature, used sparingly for emphasis or mockery.
What: Who is telling the story — first person, third person, omniscient, limited.
✨ Typical effect: Controls what we know and when; creates sympathy or distance.
Orwell's detached third-person narrator lets Napoleon condemn himself through his own decrees — more damning than narration would be.
What: The author's attitude toward the subject — ironic, reverent, mocking, warm, cold.
✨ Typical effect: Shapes how the reader feels about what they are reading, often before we notice.
Orwell's tone shifts from revolutionary idealism ("all animals are equal") to bureaucratic menace ("more equal than others"), pulling the reader from hope to disillusion.
What: The speed at which events unfold — short sentences for action, long for reflection.
✨ Typical effect: Controls urgency; creates tension or calm; manipulates the reader's heart rate.
Orwell uses staccato short sentences during the purges — each confession and execution landing with its own full stop — to numb the reader into compliance.
What: Repeating a word, phrase, or structure deliberately.
✨ Typical effect: Emphasises; builds rhythm; creates an echo the reader cannot ignore.
Orwell's Seven Commandments are repeated (and revised) so we notice each change.
What: A reference to another text, myth, historical event, or cultural figure.
✨ Typical effect: Pulls meaning from the referenced text into the new one; flatters the reader who catches it.
Butler's Kindred alludes to the slave narrative genre throughout — reframing a 20th-century woman's experience against 19th-century testimony.
Each extract below contains one dominant technique. Click the tag you think is right, then reveal the answer. If you pick wrong, do not worry — read the explanation and try the next one.
What is the dominant technique here?
The wind is given human-like judgement — it "picks", "tugs", "considers", and "agrees". This personification unsettles the reader by making even the air seem to be weighing the regime's slogans, as if nature itself is a reluctant witness.
What is the dominant technique here?
The sentence holds two contradictory ideas side by side — "equal" and "more equal" — and dares the reader to reconcile them. It is the logical impossibility itself that makes the satire devastating. You could also defensibly answer "verbal irony" (technique 8), since the pigs do not mean what they say.
What is the dominant technique here?
The speaker's choice of ritualised, ceremonial words — "our Leader", "ever-watchful", "wise guidance", "thrive, prosper and be free" — elevates Napoleon's rule to mock-heroic heights. The vocabulary itself is the technique. The effect is that the regime incriminates itself through its own grandeur. You could also defend "dramatic irony" here because we readers see what the animals cannot — that the words are hollow, and the "freedom" is a cage.
What is Orwell using across his entire novel?
A whole story where every character and event systematically stands for something else is allegory, not just metaphor. (A metaphor is local — a single comparison. An allegory runs through the entire work.) This distinction matters: examiners reward students who know the difference.
The moment the pigs begin walking on two legs. Read it carefully, then identify every technique you can find. This is the kind of close-work Criterion A rewards.
Four of the fifteen are visible in this one short passage. Click each to see how it operates — and note the number referencing the library you just learned.
Where: "It was a pig walking on his hind legs. Yes, it was Squealer."
✨ Effect: The two short sentences force the reader to register the transgression in slow motion — a beat for recognition, a beat for confirmation. The confirming "Yes" refuses to let the reader disbelieve what they are seeing.
Where: "A little awkwardly, as though not quite used to supporting his considerable bulk in that position…"
✨ Effect: Orwell's narrator slips in a humanising concession — the pig is a bit clumsy, a bit out of practice. That small aside is a choice. The narrator could have reported a seamless transformation; instead the voice makes us watch the pigs practise it, which is far more disturbing than a clean change.
Where: "a long file of pigs, all walking on their hind legs."
✨ Effect: The phrase "hind legs" is deliberately repeated. The reader is forced to witness the transgression twice, and the plural "all" turns a single violation into a procession. The taboo has become the new routine.
Where: "with perfect balance, he was strolling across the yard."
✨ Effect: "Strolling" is a leisure verb — casual, entitled, at ease. The narrator's tone endorses Squealer's composure even as the reader recoils. That gap between the calm tone and the horror being described is the technique doing the real work.
Read the Orwell extract below. In the box, list every authorial technique you can identify. Then, next to each technique, write one sentence about its effect on the reader. Aim for four techniques minimum.
1. Repetition (#14): "from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again" — the repeated grammatical structure performs the very confusion it describes. The reader's eye swings back and forth.
2. Pacing (#13): the long, breathless single sentence, broken only by semicolons, forces the reader to read it as one exhausted unbroken gaze.
3. Juxtaposition (#9): "pig" and "man" are placed in endless alternation until they dissolve. Orwell puts the two species side by side so many times that the reader cannot tell them apart either.
4. Dramatic irony (#7): the novel opened with animals rebelling against the cruelty of men; it ends with animals indistinguishable from men. We, as readers, can see the completeness of the betrayal — placed in the last line, the irony positions us to feel defeat.
Screenshot this. Carry it with you. When you analyse any IB text, scan this list and ask: which of these is the author using here?
| Technique | Typical effect on reader |
|---|---|
| 1. Diction | Reveals tone, attitude, social context |
| 2. Metaphor | Makes abstract ideas concrete |
| 3. Simile | Helps visualise; creates unexpected links |
| 4. Personification | Makes non-human things feel alive / threatening |
| 5. Symbolism | Adds depth; unifies themes |
| 6. Allegory | Whole-story code for real-world events |
| 7. Dramatic irony | Reader knows more than the character — creates dread or pity |
| 8. Verbal irony | Says one thing, means another — mocks / distances |
| 9. Juxtaposition | Places contrasts side by side — intensifies both |
| 10. Hyperbole | Exaggerates — overwhelms the reader emotionally |
| 11. Narrative voice | Controls what we know and feel |
| 12. Tone | Shapes how the reader feels, often subliminally |
| 13. Pacing | Controls urgency and tension |
| 14. Repetition | Emphasises; builds rhythm; creates echo |
| 15. Allusion | Pulls in meaning from another text / event |