VOICE LESSONS: Imagery

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• VOICE LESSONSImagery

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Imagerywhat is it?

• The use of vivid language to create a picture
  of a sensory experience.
• In other words using words (often adjectives and
  adjective phrases) to describe what often is
  experiential.
• The goal of imagery is to recreate the sensory
  experience for the reader...but never, ever, on
  pain of death say that the imagery paints a
  mental picture for the reader. Go deeper than
  that!

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Your FIVE Senses use the correct terminology!

• Sightvisual imagery
• Soundauditory imagery
• Touchtactile imagery
• Smellolfactory imagery
• Tastegustatory imagery

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How imagery happens

• Diction Detail sensory experience
• (very closely tied to these initial elements of
  voice)

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Imagery and Figurative Language the connection

• Imagery can be strictly literal, but sometimes a
  writer uses figurative language.
• Figurative language Language that implies a
  message in a way than is not meant to be
  literally interpreted. Figurative language can
  include simile, metaphor, personification, irony,
  hyperbole, etc.

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More on imagery figurative language

• Imagery alone is NOT figurative, but writers
  often take the opportunity to make imagery
  figurative to make the words stand for or
  represent something else, especially as a
  metaphr.
• Examples
• The parched earth can be metaphorical for a
  despairing situation.
• The flutter of a birds flight can be
  metaphorical for hope.

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Consider (from Voice Lessons)

• She looked into the distance, and the old
  terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again.
  Edna heard her fathers voice and her sister
  Margarets. She heard the barking of an old dog
  that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs
  of the cavalry officer clanged as he walked
  across the porch. There was the hum of bees, and
  the musky odor of pinks filled the air.
• Kate Chopin, The Awakening

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Discuss

• Analysis
• Although the narrator looks into the distance,
  the images are primarily auditory. What are the
  auditory images in the passage? What mood to
  these images create?
• The last sentence of this passage contains an
  olfactory image (the musky odor of pinks fill the
  air). What effect does the use of an olfactory
  image, after a series of auditory images, have on
  the reader?

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Check yourself

• Discussion
• Auditory images include her fathers voice, her
  sister Margarets voice, the barking of a dog,
  the spurs of a cavalry officer, and the hum of
  the bees. These images create a mood of
  loneliness. All of the images of ordinary life
  are in the distance, audible but not immediate.
  Nothing directly interacts with Edna. She is a
  watcher and a listener, removed from the homely
  action of the passage.
• The olfactory image brings the reader back to
  Edna. The auditory images are all in the
  distance. However, the olfactory image fills the
  air. It shifts the readers attention and
  concern back to Edna and her loneliness.