Amplification Examples

To amplify something means to make it louder or more intense. When referring to writing, amplification means that the writer has added additional details to a sentence in order to make the idea more clear and understandable. In other words, the writer has added additional description to make the meaning more clear.

The movie was boring.
The movie, with its predictable scenes, flat characters, and cliché lines, was boring and not worth the money I spent on a ticket.

Mrs. Jones is unfair.
Mrs. Jones is unfair, often testing us over material we have not been taught and refusing to answer questions when we don't understand the content.

The tree was magnificent.
The large oak tree, spanning five feet across at the trunk and with branches reaching out at least 20 feet, stood magnificent and proud, draped in green leaf jewels and fine threads of Spanish moss.

Examples of Amplification in Literature

Charles Dickens amplifies the idea of what it means to be "bran-new" in this excerpt from Our Mutual Friend:

Mr. and Mrs. Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their place was new, . . . their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly-married as was lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him, French-polished to the crown of his head.

In The Scarlett Letter, Nathanial Hawthorne amplifies the narrator's impulse to write an autobiography in the following manner:

It is a little remarkable, that-though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends-an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public. The first time was three or four years since, when I favored the reader-inexcusably, and for no earthly reason, that either the indulgent reader or the intrusive author could imagine-with a description of my way of life in the deep quietude of an Old Manse. And now-because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enough to find a listener or two on the former occasion-I again seize the public by the button, and talk of my three years' experience in a Custom-House.