A Hot Summer Day

Learn, Create, Analyze, Imitate

Summary

Literary tools are powerful devices that completely shape the ideas of what’s written. This lesson emphasizes analysis and application by having students extract creative concepts from authors and integrate them into their own writing. We begin by learning the literary devices that apply to style and imagery, and create a two paragraph story describing a setting applying those terms. Then we analyze authors describing a similar setting, and label the literary tools we find in the excerpts. Finally we have students steal excerpts that they like from the authors and adapt them into their initial writing.

Learning Goals (Grades 9-12)

• Have a deep understanding of basic literary tools and how to apply them.

• Appreciate the power and importance of literary tools such as style and imagery.

• Enjoy the excerpts that were analyzed and have a greater enthusiasm for reading.

• Understand how to extract complex creative concepts and apply them to their own works.

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Learn: Terminology

• Style: Comprising an author’s diction, syntax, tone, characters, and other narrative techniques, “style” is used to describe the way an author uses language to convey his or her ideas and purpose in writing. An author’s style can also be associated to the genre or mode of writing the author adopts.

• Tone: Tone is a literary device that reflects the writer’s attitude toward the subject matter or audience of a literary work. By conveying this attitude through tone, the writer creates a particular relationship with the reader that, in turn, influences the intention and meaning of the written words. This also applies to characters and narrators as well.

• Imagery: A term used to describe an author’s use of vivid descriptions “that evoke sense-impressions by literal or figurative reference to perceptible or ‘concrete’ objects, scenes, actions, or states” (Baldick 121). Imagery can refer to the literal landscape or characters described in a narrative or the theoretical concepts an author employs.

• Metaphor: A figure of speech that refers to one thing by another in order to identify similarities between the two (and therefore define each in relation to one another).

• Simile: A figure of speech that compares two people, objects, elements, or concepts using “like” or “as.

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What’s the difference between some of these terms?

Metaphor and Simile:

Both are used to make a comparison between two things. The difference is that similes make the comparison by saying that something is like something else but metaphors make the comparison by saying that something is something else.

Style, Tone, and Imagery:

The best way to separate these three are to think of them as a Russian Doll set.Style is the largest doll that describes a writers genre. To achieve style, authors use Tone (2nd doll), which focuses more on word choice

and imagery(3rd doll).

Learn: Types of Prose Texts

• Bildungsroman: This is typically a type of novel that depicts an individual’s coming-of-age through self-discovery and personal knowledge. Such stories often explore the protagonists’ psychological and moral development. Examples include Dickens’ Great Expectations and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

• Epistolary: A novel composed primarily of letters sent and received by its principal characters. This type of novel was particularly popular during the eighteenth century.

• Essay: According to Baldick, “a short written composition in prose that discusses a subject or proposes an argument without claiming to be a complete or thorough exposition” (Baldick 87). A notable example of the essay form is Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” which uses satire to discuss eighteenth-century economic and social concerns in Ireland.

• Novella: An intermediate-length (between a novel and a short story) fictional narrative.

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Summary of “Summer Crossing” - Truman Capote

Set in New York just after World War II, the story follows a young carefree socialite, Grady McNeil, whose parents leave her alone in their Fifth Avenue penthouse for the summer. Left to her own devices, Grady turns up the heat on the secret affair she's been having with a Brooklyn-born Jewish war veteran who works as a parking lot attendant. As the season passes, the romance turns more serious and morally ambiguous, and Grady must eventually make a series of decisions that will forever affect her life and the lives of everyone around her.

1. Based on this summary, which type of prose was this book written in?

• Bildungsroman

• Epistolary

• Essay

• Novella

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Create: The Terminology in Action!

2. Write a paragraph describing a hot summer's day from your point of view.

• Write this in the most stylistic way possible. Use the terminology we discussed to fuel your style.

• If you are having writer's block, NO WORRIES! You and every other author! Try and think of a book, movie, or TV show that has a style that you really like and try to emulate that!

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Analyze: “Summer Crossing” - Truman Capote

“The next day, Monday, marked the start of a memorable heat-wave. Although the morning papers said simply fair and warm, it was apparent by noon that something exceptional was happening, and office-workers, drifting back from lunch with the dazed desperate expression of children being bullied, began to dial Weather. Toward mid afternoon, as the heat closed in like a hand over a murder victim's mouth, the city thrashed and twisted but, with its outcry muffled, its hurry hampered, its ambitions hindered, it was like a dry fountain, some useless monument, and so sank into a coma. The steaming willow-limp stretches of Central Park were like a battlefield where many have fallen: rows of exhausted casualties lay crumpled in the dead-still shade, while newspaper photographers, documenting the disaster, moved sepulchrally among them. In the cat house at the zoo, the suffering lions roared.”

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Analyze: “Summer Crossing” - Truman Capote

3. Label all literary devices you can find.

“The next day, Monday, marked the start of a memorable heat-wave. Although the morning papers said simply fair and warm, it was apparent by noon that something exceptional was happening, and office-workers, drifting back from lunch with the dazed desperate expression of children being bullied, began to dial Weather. Toward mid afternoon, as the heat closed in like a hand over a murder victim's mouth, the city thrashed and twisted but, with its outcry muffled, its hurry hampered, its ambitions hindered, it was like a dry fountain, some useless monument, and so sank into a coma. The steaming willow-limp stretches of Central Park were like a battlefield where many have fallen: rows of exhausted casualties lay crumpled in the dead-still shade, while newspaper photographers, documenting the disaster, moved sepulchrally among them. In the cat house at the zoo, the suffering lions roared.”

Alliteration Simile Metaphor Imagery

4. Describe the Style and Tone of this excerpt

The tone of the narrator feels cold, matter-of-fact, and sarcastic.

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Analyze: “After me Comes the Flood” - Sarah Perry

3. Label all literary devices you can find.

I’d hoped the weather might be breaking at last, but the sky was blank and bright and my head immediately began to ache. I let myself into my flat and packed a small bag, then left with the haste of a schoolboy playing truant. Twice I walked up and down the road before I found my car, feeling the heat beat like a hammer on the pavement, hardly knowing one end of the street from the other. When at last I saw it, the bonnet was covered in a fine reddish dust and someone had drawn a five-pointed star on the windscreen.

Alliteration Simile Metaphor Imagery

4. Describe the Style and Tone of this excerpt.

The tone of this character sounds rushed and irritated. The character is describing their actions with haste using words such as “haste” and “immediately”. Phrases like “I walked up and down” can promote that feeling a hurriedness.

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Analyze: The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens

3. Label all literary devices you can find.

There is no month in the whole year in which nature wears a more beautiful appearance than in the month of August. Spring has many beauties, and May is a fresh and blooming month, but the charms of this time of year are enhanced by their contrast with the winter season. August has no such advantage. It comes when we remember nothing but clear skies, green fields, and sweet-smelling flowers—when the recollection of snow, and ice, and bleak winds, has faded from our minds as completely as they have disappeared from the earth—and yet what a pleasant time it is! Orchards and cornfields ring with the hum of labour; trees bend beneath the thick clusters of rich fruit which bow their branches to the ground; and the corn, piled in graceful sheaves, or waving in every light breath that sweeps above it, as if it wooed the sickle, tinges the landscape with a golden hue. A mellow softness appears to hang over the whole earth; the influence of the season seems to extend itself to the very wagon, whose slow motion across the well-reaped field is perceptible only to the eye, but strikes with no harsh sound upon the ear.

Alliteration Simile Metaphor Imagery

4. Describe the Style and Tone of this excerpt.

The tone of this narrator sounds positive and reminiscent.

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Imitate:

Imitate the authors we analyzed by picking three examples of literary devices being used in the excerpts, and plugging them into the paragraph you previously wrote. You will have to adapt your examples to best fit into your story. Find ways to personalize the example through manipulation.