“The author uses a metaphor here.” Full stop. Student looks up, satisfied, as if the sentence has done its job. It hasn’t. It’s named a tool. It hasn’t said what the tool does.
As lang and lit teachers, we see this phenomenon constantly, and the scale at which this persists, we can agree the student is not to be blamed for it. I think this is what happens when a curriculum spends years training students to find things and comparatively little time training them to ask what those things do to a reader.
My worry isn’t that IB Language and Literature cares too much about technique. It’s that it often stops one step short of why technique was ever worth naming in the first place.
Technique-spotting is a well-documented dead end — and exam boards already know it.
This is not a fringe complaint. Across English-language exam systems, examiners have a name for exactly this failure: “feature spotting” — identifying a device without explaining its effect. GCSE and AP examiner guidance consistently singles it out as a mark-capping error, regardless of how accurate or sophisticated the terminology is. One widely cited examiner’s report put it plainly: naming a device is not, by itself, sufficient to earn credit at any meaningful level — the label has to be followed by an account of what it’s doing.
The analogy I find most useful, borrowed from exam-prep writing on this exact problem: a mechanic who points at a car and says “that’s a turbocharger, that’s a wheel, that’s an exhaust pipe” has identified parts. A mechanic worth paying has explained what the turbocharger does — how it changes performance, why it matters for this particular engine. Naming is inventory. Analysis is mechanism.
So when a student writes “the author uses a metaphor,” they’ve done the equivalent of pointing at the turbocharger. The actually interesting question — the one that makes the sentence worth writing — is what that metaphor does to a reader sitting with the page.
What the research says is actually happening when a technique “works”
This is where it gets genuinely interesting, because there’s real empirical work on this — not speculation about what a device “might” do, but research that put readers in front of texts and measured what happened.
The foundational concept here is defamiliarization, first named by the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky: literary technique works by making familiar things strange again, forcing a reader to actually perceive something rather than skim past it on autopilot.
A century later, researchers David Miall and Don Kuiken turned that idea into something testable. In a now-classic study, they had readers work through short stories sentence by sentence, rating each one for how striking and how emotionally affecting it felt, while also measuring reading time. The sentences dense with stylistic devices — what they called foregrounding — were rated as more striking, more emotional, and readers slowed down to read them. The effect held regardless of how much formal literary training the reader had.
Later work went further: foregrounded, stylistically unusual language appears to be processed within the first fraction of a second of encountering it, triggering an affective response before a reader has consciously “noticed” anything unusual at all. In other words, technique doesn’t just decorate meaning — it physically changes how a reader’s attention and feeling move through a sentence, often before the reader is aware it’s happening. A metaphor doesn’t just mean something. It slows you down, snags your attention, and opens a gap your mind has to do active work to close — and that work is where feeling and interpretation actually get built.
This is the piece that “the author uses a metaphor here” leaves completely untouched. The device was never the point. The mechanism — what it does to the reader’s pace, attention, and emotional state, and why that matters for this particular moment in this particular text — was always the actual object of analysis.
Why this matters for “becoming a good communicator”
Here’s the part I think gets lost in a lot of technique-focused instruction: rhetoric, in its oldest sense, is nothing but this. The deliberate use of a device to produce a specific effect in an audience is what every good communicator — essayist, speaker, advertiser, novelist — is doing on purpose.
A writer who repeats a sound, withholds information, or shifts tense isn’t showing off vocabulary. They’re pulling a lever they know moves a reader’s attention or feeling in a particular direction.
If a student only ever learns to recognise that lever — to point and name it — they’ve learned literary trivia. If they learn to explain why pulling it produces the effect it does, they’ve learned something they can use the next time they’re the one writing.
There’s direct evidence for that transfer: a classroom study examining students taught to analyse specific literary techniques in texts found that, over time, those same students began imitating the techniques they’d studied in their own creative writing — the analytical habit became a compositional one. That’s the real payoff “becoming a good communicator” is pointing at: not a student who can label fifteen devices, but one who understands how language moves a reader closely enough to move one on purpose, themselves.
Teachers, what this could look like in practice?
A few shifts that would close the gap between naming and understanding:
- Replace “what device is this?” with “what did this do to you, and how?” Ask students to notice their own reading slow down, their own attention snag, before asking them to label why.
- Make the terminology secondary to the testimony. A correct label with no account of effect should score lower than an accurate description of effect with an imprecise label — the current instinct in most classrooms (and most rubrics) runs the other way. Sadly!
- Have students use the device, not just spot it. Ask them to write their own paragraph using repetition, or withheld information, or a sudden tense shift, and then ask what it did to a reader. Mechanism learned from the inside sticks in a way mechanism learned from a glossary doesn’t.
Technique vocabulary isn’t the enemy here — a student does need the word “foreshadowing” to talk precisely about what a writer is doing. But the vocabulary was only ever meant to be a means of pointing at something more interesting underneath it: the actual, demonstrable way language reaches into a reader and changes what they feel and notice. Teach that, and the terminology takes care of itself.
Teach only the terminology, and you’ve built excellent taxonomists who still can’t tell you why the book moved them or know how to move someone else.
Leave a Reply