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Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's Writing Style Essay

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A virtuoso of suspense and horror, Edgar Allan Poe is known for his Gothic writing style. His style is created through his use of punctuation, sentence structure, word choice, tone, and figurative language. Punctuation-wise; dashes, exclamation marks, semicolons, and commas are a favorite of Poe. His sentences vary greatly; their structures are influenced by punctuation. Much of his word choice set the tone of his works. Figurative language colors his writings with description. Such is observed in the similarities between two of his most well-known short stories, “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Tell-Tale Heart
To begin with, Poe valued punctuation in its ability to make a point. Proper use of punctuation allowed the reader to feel the …show more content…

Just as the choppiness caused by punctuation build suspense, so does short sentences. In “The Cask of Amontillado”, the climax builds in “Then I heard the furious rattling of the chain. The noise lasted for several minutes” as Fortunato’s drunkenness begins to wear off. Readers wonder whether or not Montresor’s revenge would be successful. Poe utilizes punctuation and sentence structure to make an impression.
In addition, one of the greatest distinctions in Poe’s technique is his choice of “dark” words, which add to the genre of his stories. In both “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado”, these words portray madness, death, fury, and murder to create fear. For example, when the narrator explains how the old man’s efforts to imagine his fears causeless to be in vain, he says, “All in vain; because Death, in approaching him, had stalked with his black shadow before him and enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel—although he neither saw nor heard—to feel the presence of my head within the room” The usage of such disturbing words like “vain”, “Death”, “stalked”, “mournful”,

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