Competency 7: Analyze the figures of speech and other literary techniques and devices in the text.
It involves writing about a personal experience, real people, or events. It is writing about a fact, rather than fiction.
The writer can write about anything, such as a personal experience, current events, or issues in the public eye. The writer can also inject personal thoughts, feelings, or opinions into the writing.
Also known as “Literary Journalism.”
Character. The nonfiction piece often requires a main character.
Setting and scene. The writer creates action-oriented scenes, including dialogue, and contains vivid descriptions.
Plot and plot structure. These are the main events that make up the story.
Figurative language. The writer often uses simile and metaphor to create an interesting piece of creative nonfiction.
Imagery. The writer constructs “word pictures” using sensory language. Imagery can be figurative or literal.
Point of view. Often the writer uses the first person “I.”
Dialogue. These are the conversations spoken between people. It is an important component of creative nonfiction.
Theme. There is a central idea that is weaved through the essay or work. Often, the theme reveals a universal truth.
The writer crafts an essay based on personal experience or a single event, which results in significant personal meaning or a lesson learned. The writer uses the first person, “I.”
The writer constructs a true story about a time or period in his/her life, which had a significant personal meaning and a universal truth. The writer composes the story using the first person, “I.”
The writer crafts an essay about an issue or topic using literary devices, such as fiction and figurative language elements.
The writer composes his/her life story, from birth to the present, using the first person “I.”
The writer crafts articles or essays about travel using literary devices.
The writer crafts stories about food and cuisine using literary devices.
The writer constructs biographies or essays on real people using literary devices.
A figure of speech is a word or phrase that possesses a separate meaning from its literal definition.
Alliteration: The repetition of an initial consonant sound.
Example: She sells seashells by the seashore.
Anaphora: The repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or verses.
Example: Unfortunately, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time on a wrong day.
Antithesis: The juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced phrases.
Example: Folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
Apostrophe: Directly addressing a nonexistent person or an inanimate object as though it were a living being.
Example: Oh, you stupid car, you never work when I need you to.
Assonance: Identity or similarity in sound between internal vowels in neighboring words.
Example: How now, brown cow?
Chiasmus: A verbal pattern in which the second half of an expression is balanced against the first but with the parts reversed.
Example: The famous chef said people should live to eat, not eat to live.
Euphemism: The substitution of an inoffensive term for one considered offensively explicit.
Example: We're teaching our toddler how to go potty.
Hyperbole: An extravagant statement; the use of exaggerated terms for emphasis or heightened effect.
Example: I have a ton of things to do when I get home.
Irony: The use of words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning. Also, a statement or situation where the idea's appearance or presentation contradicts the meaning.
Example: “Oh, I love spending big bucks," said my dad, a notorious penny pincher.
Litotes: A figure of speech consisting of an understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite.
Example: A million dollars is no small chunk of change.
Metaphor: An implied comparison between two dissimilar things that have something in common.
Example: All the world's a stage.
Metonymy: A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated; also, the rhetorical strategy of describing something indirectly by referring to things around it.
Example: That stuffed suit with the briefcase is a poor excuse for a salesman.
Onomatopoeia: The use of words that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to.
Example: The clap of thunder went bang and scared my poor dog.
Oxymoron: A figure of speech in which incongruous or contradictory terms appear side by side.
Example: He popped the jumbo shrimp in his mouth.
Paradox: A statement that appears to contradict itself.
Example: This is the beginning of the end.
Personification: A figure of speech in which an inanimate object or abstraction is endowed with human qualities or abilities.
Example: That kitchen knife will take a bite out of your hand if you don't handle it safely.
Pun: A play on words, sometimes on different senses of the same word and sometimes on the similar sense or sound of different words.
Example: A boiled egg every morning is hard to beat.
Simile: A stated comparison (usually formed with "like" or "as") between two fundamentally dissimilar things that have certain qualities in common.
Example: Roberto was white as a sheet after he walked out of the horror movie.
Synecdoche: A figure of speech in which a part is used to represent the whole.
Example: Tina is learning her ABCs in preschool.
Understatement: A figure of speech in which a writer or speaker deliberately makes a situation seem less important or serious than it is.
Example: “You could say Babe Ruth was a decent ballplayer," the reporter said with a wink.
I Am a Filipino
by Carlos P. Romulo
I am a Filipino – inheritor of a glorious past, hostage to the uncertain future. As such, I must prove equal to a two-fold task – the task of meeting my responsibility to the past, and the task of performing my obligation to the future.
I am sprung from a hardy race – child many generations removed of ancient Malayan pioneers. Across the centuries, the memory comes rushing back to me: of brown-skinned men putting out to sea in ships that were as frail as their hearts were stout. Over the sea I see them come, borne upon the billowing wave and the whistling wind, carried upon the mighty swell of hope – hope in the free abundance of the new land that was to be their home and their children’s forever. This is the land they sought and found. Every inch of shore that their eyes first set upon, every hill and mountain that beckoned to them with a green and purple invitation, every mile of rolling plain that their view encompassed, every river and lake that promised a plentiful living and the fruitfulness of commerce, is a hollowed spot to me.
By the strength of their hearts and hands, by every right of law, human and divine, this land and all the appurtenances thereof – the black and fertile soil, the seas and lakes and rivers teeming with fish, the forests with their inexhaustible wealth in wild and timber, the mountains with their bowels swollen with minerals – the whole of this rich and happy land has been for centuries without number, the land of my fathers. This land I received in trust from them, and in trust will pass it to my children, and so on until the world is no more.
I am a Filipino. In my blood runs the immortal seed of heroes – seed that flowered down the centuries in deeds of courage and defiance. In my veins yet pulses the same hot blood that sent Lapulapu to battle against the alien foe, that drove Diego Silang and Dagohoy into rebellion against the foreign oppressor,
That seed is immortal. It is the self-same seed that flowered in the heart of Jose Rizal that morning in Bagumbayan when a volley of shots put an end to all that was mortal of him and made his spirit deathless forever; the same that flowered in the hearts of Bonifacio in Balintawak, of Gregorio del Pilar at Tirad Pass, of Antonio Luna at Calumpit, that bloomed in flowers of frustration in the sad heart of Emilio Aguinaldo at Palanan, and yet burst forth royally again in the proud heart of Manuel L. Quezon when he stood at last on the threshold of ancient Malacanang Palace, in the symbolic act of possession and racial vindication.
The seed I bear within me is an immortal seed. It is the mark of my manhood, the symbol of my dignity as a human being. Like the seeds that were once buried in the tomb of Tutankhamen many thousands of years ago, it shall grow and flower and bear fruit again. It is the insigne of my race, and my generation is but a stage in the unending search of my people for freedom and happiness.
I am a Filipino, child of the marriage of the East and the West. The East, with its languor and mysticism, its passivity and endurance, was my mother, and my sire was the West that came thundering across the seas with the Cross and Sword and the Machine. I am of the East, an eager participant in its struggles for liberation from the imperialist yoke. But I know also that the East must awake from its centuried sleep, shake off the lethargy that has bound its limbs, and start moving where destiny awaits.
For I, too, am of the West, and the vigorous peoples of the West have destroyed forever the peace and quiet that once were ours. I can no longer live, a being apart from those whose world now trembles to the roar of bomb and cannon shot. For no man and no nation is an island, but a part of the main, and there is no longer any East and West – only individuals and nations making those momentous choices that are the hinges upon which history revolves.
At the vanguard of progress in this part of the world I stand – a forlorn figure in the eyes of some, but not one defeated and lost. For through the thick, interlacing branches of habit and custom above me I have seen the light of the sun, and I know that it is good. I have seen the light of justice and equality and freedom, my heart has been lifted by the vision of democracy, and I shall not rest until my land and my people shall have been blessed by these, beyond the power of any man or nation to subvert or destroy.
I am a Filipino, and this is my inheritance. What pledge shall I give that I may prove worthy of my inheritance? I shall give the pledge that has come ringing down the corridors of the centuries, and its hall be compounded of the joyous cries of my Malayan forebears when they first saw the contours of this land loom before their eyes, of the battle cries that have resounded in every field of combat from Mactan to Tirad Pass, of the voices of my people when they sing:
Land of the morning.
Child of the sun returning . . .
Ne’er shall invaders
Trample thy sacred shore.
Out of the lush green of these seven thousand isles, out of the heart-strings of sixteen million people all vibrating to one song, I shall weave the mighty fabric of my pledge. Out of the songs of the farmers at sunrise when they go to labor in the fields; out the sweat of the hard-bitten pioneers in Mal-ig and Koronadal; out of the silent endurance of stevedores at the piers and the ominous grumbling of peasants in Pampanga; out of the first cries of babies newly born and the lullabies that mothers sing; out of crashing of gears and the whine of turbines in the factories; out of the crunch of ploughs upturning the earth; out of the limitless patience of teachers in the classrooms and doctors in the clinics; out of the tramp of soldiers marching, I shall make the pattern of my pledge:
I am a Filipino born of freedom, and I shall not rest until freedom shall have been added unto my inheritance – for myself and my children’s – forever.