Analyzing characters is an essential part of teaching literary analysis. Characterization is the process that an author uses to reveal the personality of characters in a literary text. Character traits, motives, choices, and psychology help readers identify author’s message, theme, tone, mood, and propel the plot in a narrative forward.
Character traits include attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, mannerisms, or habits that make up an individual in literature. These attributes can be perceived as positive or negative. Often, authors will reveal character traits through the following methods: physical description, how/what the character thinks, what the author directly states, what the character says, what the character does/how they act, and dialogue with other characters/what other characters believe.
Click the link below to download a free PDF of 500 character traits to assist your students with character analysis.






This is an amazing list! My “homework” from my therapist is to try to figure out 5 character traits. I hope I can find at least 5 on this list.
This really helped me in class today thank you so much for puting this up
so true literally this list helped me with my homework
This helped me for class today for character traits thank you so much. esto me ayudó para la clase de hoy para los rasgos de carácter, muchas gracias.
It helped me a lot too
This helped me develop charecters for my teams up coming book, thank you.
Thanks!! Really helped me alot 🙂
thanks helped a lot thank you.
Yeah bruh same
Thanks It helped me a lot with my work
thanks helped a lot
this list is amazing! It helps when your doing a presentation for school and need some help.
This helped so much, I couldn’t finish my homework, now I can.
This helped so much for homework, thank you!
Thanks this will help out so much for upcoming prodjects and class work
This really helped me. Thank you!