The meter of the bon-puri is based on the number of syllables. The basic meter involves a line of two four-syllable feet, but lines where the first foot has three syllables and the second foot has five syllables are also frequent. The genre is also characterized by formulaic phrases often involving parallelism or repetition, which are found identically in many different works. For instance, many village-shrine bon-puri include the following sentence word-to-word in their conclusions, describing how the protagonist became a god that governs the lives of the villagers:
