How to Write an Allusion
You can create your own allusions by bringing up words or images from earlier in your work (internal allusion) or by bringing them in from an outside source (external allusion). It’s pretty easy to do once you get the hang of it.
External Allusion
- Observe the parallel between your idea and the source material. You may notice that a painting, myth, Bible story, or other source material somehow mirrors what you want to say. Maybe the characters undergo a similar experience – or maybe there’s a historical event that’s somehow related.
- Replace the general language with an allusion. Here are some examples of what this might look like:
Normal sentence:
You’re going to create a whole lot of problems with this sort of behavior!
With allusion:
You’re going to open up Pandora’s box with this sort of behavior!
Normal sentence:
“In the forest, everything was peaceful and beautiful.”
With allusion:
In the forest, everything was like the Garden of Eden.
Internal Allusion
- Observe the parallel between your idea and some earlier moment in the text. Ideally, this is the sort of thing you should plan ahead for. If you know that a certain idea is central to your argument or story, you can be on the lookout for places to allude back to it.
- Borrow the words from the first time the idea appeared. This is key! In order to make the allusion land, you want to use the same words again. (There’s a good example of this in §7.)
Here is an example from a history paper about two Civil War generals. Imagine that these are topic sentences for separate paragraphs at different points in the paper:
Without allusion:
- Generals Sheridan and Forrest both had great energy and charisma.
- They also employed similar tactics in battle.
With allusion:
- Generals Sheridan and Forrest both had great energy and charisma.
- Their energy and charisma enabled both Sheridan and Forrest to employ daring tactics in battle.
Notice how the internal allusion helps the reader to see how the two sentences are related. The words “energy and charisma” are repeated to emphasize this allusion.
When to Use Allusion
How and when you use allusion depends on what you’re writing.
Formal Essays
In formal essays such as term papers and the like, internal allusion is an indispensable technique for making your argument stick together. By alluding to an earlier idea or point that you made, you can show the reader how the whole paper is building up a single, coherent whole. From time to time, you can do this explicitly, but more subtle allusions are also effective. Here’s an example from a history paper:
Initial Statement:
Alexander the Great failed to conquer India because his troops became unruly and homesick.
Allusion:
Homesickness and poor morale reared their heads once more during the campaigns of Julius Caesar.
Notice how, in the allusion, the writer doesn’t just come right out and say that Alexander and Caesar had similar stories. In fact, the name Alexander isn’t even mentioned! But nonetheless, it’s clear that the writer is alluding to his or her earlier statement about Alexander in India. This is a pretty subtle example of allusion.
Here’s a more direct way of making the same allusion:
Just like Alexander the Great, Julius Ceasar had to deal with low morale and homesickness among his troops.
Do not use external allusion in formal essays. Instead, use citations. This is for two reasons:
- An external allusion can come perilously close to plagiarism, which is using another person’s work without giving them credit. Citations are a way to avoid this pitfall.
- Overuse of external allusion can sound pretentious or pointless in a formal essay – it may give the impression that the writer just wants to show off how many books he or she has read without saying anything of substance about them.
Creative Writing
Internal allusion has a very similar effect in creative writing to the one it has in formal essays. It lends overall coherence to the narrative, and helps the reader follow the “thread” of the author’s words.
External allusion, however, can be much more effective in creative writing than in formal essays. As we saw in §1, allusions to Bible stories and Greek mythology are everywhere in Western literature, and there’s no reason you can’t adopt this technique in your own writing. You can allude to any story or work of art that you think your reader will be familiar with – external allusions won’t work if your reader is unfamiliar with the source material!
Be aware, though, that overuse of external allusion in a creative piece can also have the problem of sounding pretentious or pointless. If done without care, it just reads like you want to say “look how much I’ve read!” Any time you want to employ an external allusion, it’s important to make sure that you’re doing it for some real creative purpose – not just to show off your knowledge of other authors.
In short, you can always use internal allusion to great effect in your writing, alongside explicit references and (in formal essays) citation. External allusion requires more caution, but can still be very effective in creative writing.