Word Choice

What Is It: When an object, place, or person represents a meaning beyond itself. Symbols never have one single meaning. Every character likely interacts with them in different ways and develops their own ideas on what they come to represent.

How to Annotate for It: Look for objects, places, or people that appear multiple times throughout the story. Symbols usually show up as a major shift is happening in the plot or as a way to demonstrate the difference between two groups. Sometimes there will be an emphasis on the symbols, with more imagery or details provided to demonstrate their importance.

What Is It: Any appeal to the five senses, especially those senses other than sight. The more senses activated, the stronger the imagery.

How to Annotate for It: Look for descriptive language (adjectives), and especially language that captures multiple senses at once. After finding that language, consider what emotions the author wants you to experience through that imagery and how those fit their purposes. Sometimes the imagery supports or signals symbolic and figurative meanings.

What Is It: An author’s word choice and how it communicates the author’s implied meaning or tone. Usually it deals with parsing out the denotation and connotation of words, specifically the intensity of emotion reflected through them.

Some key diction types:

• Abstract vs. Concrete

• Formal vs. Informal

• Literal vs. Figurative

• Denotation vs. Connotation

What Is It: Facts, opinions, or information provided to help contextualize the reading. Authors will use a lot of detail for something they want you pay close attention to. They will also obscure detail if they want to leave you with questions, even using something like Synecdoche or Metonymy. Often this requires you to fill in the blanks, which may fit into their ultimate purposes.

How to Annotate for It: Pay attention to any moment where the author directly tells you a fact/opinion and then watch for moments where they stray from that fact/opinion. These are inconsistencies that should be explored. If there is somewhere you think there should be a lot of detail, and there isn’t, ask why.

Connection to Presence

What Is It: A motif is a repeated image, idea, or movement—can help reinforce the overall theme of a work. They become symbols that stand for other ideas and their repetition helps to reinforce that symbols meaning.

Note: The chapters of How to Read Literature like a Professor explore common motifs of literature.

How to Annotate for It: Look for objects or ideas that show up across a text (or across literature). What role do they play in each scene and does that role change over the course of the story?

What Is It: Authors will sometimes try to mimic language from an earlier time to give their work a feeling of age and wisdom. Older texts usually have more authority, so looking old adds to the authority of a text.

Tips for Understanding:

1. Box different clauses/phrases

2. Identify the subject and verb

3. Pull out the essential details to get a summary of the section

4. Reorder the sentence with relevant details to match what you’re used to