| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Allegory | a short moral story (often with animal characters) |
| Allusion | a reference to another work of literature, person, or event |
| Ambiguity | The multiple meanings, either intentional or unintentional, of a word, phrase, sentence, or passage. |
| Animal Imagery | creative language comparing and giving people animal like characteristics. |
| Antagonist | the character who works against the protagonist in the story |
| Apostrophe | address to an absent or imaginary person |
| Characterization | the act of describing distinctive characteristics or essential features |
| Conflict | opposition between or among characters or forces in a literary work that spurs or motivates the action of a plot (internal, external; person vs. person, self, nature, society) |
| Connotation | an idea that is implied or suggested |
| Denotation | The dictionary definition of a word |
| Diction | A writer's or speaker's choice of words |
| Figurative Language | Writing or speech that is used to create vivid impressions by setting up comparisons between dissimilar things, [examples are metaphor, simile, and personification. |
| Framing | Story within a story, Poem with similar language |
| Genre | type or category of literary work (e.g., poetry, essay, short story, novel, drama) |
| Hyperbole | Exaggeration |
| Imagery | the ability to form mental images of things or events |
| Irony | incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs |
| Dramatic Irony | (theater) irony that occurs when the meaning of the situation is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play |
| Situational Irony | occurs when the outcome of a work is unexpected, or events turn out to be the opposite from what one had expected |
| Verbal Irony | A figure of speech in which what is said is the opposite of what is meant |
| Juxtaposition | the act of positioning close together (or side by side), placing two elements side by side to present a comparison or contrast |
| Antithesis | the juxtaposition of contrasting words or ideas to give a feeling of balance |
| Oxymoron | A figure of speech that combines opposite or contradictory terms in a brief phrase. |
| Paradox | a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth |
| Metonymy | symbolism; one thing is used as a substitute for another with which it is closely identified (the White House) |
| Litotes | understatement for rhetorical effect (especially when expressing an affirmative by negating its contrary) |
| Metaphor | comparison not using like or as |
| Mood | the feeling from reading a piece of literature |
| Motif | a unifying idea that is a recurrent element in a literary or artistic work |
| Persona | the speaker, voice, or character assumed by the author of a piece of writing |
| Personification | the act of attributing human characteristics to abstract ideas etc. |
| First Point of view | the narrator is a character in the story |
| Limited 3rd point of view | Only main characters Ideas we get |
| Omniscient | all-knowing |
| Protagonist | the main character in a literary work |
| Satire | a literary work that ridicules or criticizes a human vice through humor or derision |
| Setting | Location, Time of a place |
| Simile | comparison using like or as |
| Soliloquy | in drama, a character speaks alone on stage to allow his/her thoughts and ideas to be conveyed to the audience |
| Style | The way the writer writes and how we annotate |
| Symbol | anything that stands for or represents something else |
| Synecdoche | using a part of something to represent the whole thing |
| Synesthesia | a mixing of senses (a blue smell) |
| Syntax | sentence structure |
| Theme | A statement that is related to the book and the real world |
| Tone | of one's speech, varying the pitch |
| Alliteration | repetition of initial consonant sounds |
| Assonance | the repetition of vowel sounds |
| Consonance | the repetition of consonants (or consonant patterns) especially at the ends of words |
| Onomatopoeia | using words that imitate the sound they denote |
| End rhyme | Rhyme that occurs at the end of two or more lines of poetry |
| Internal Rhyme | a rhyme between words in the same line |
| Sight Rhyme | rhyming that occurs through the similarity of the spelling of words, rather than their sounds |
| Near Rhyme | Sounds are almost but not exactly alike. A common form of this is consonance, which consists of identical consonant sounds preceded by different vowel sounds: home; same worth, breath. |
| Half Rhyme | words that almost rhyme, slant rhyme (dizzy/easy) |
| Rhyme Scheme | the pattern of rhyme in a poem |
| Refrain | a regularly repeated line or group of lines in a poem or song |
| Rhythm | Rise and Fall as you read |
| Stressed Syllable | / |
| Unstressed Syllable | u |
| Meter | patterns of stress |
| Foot | unit of poetry with one stress syllable |
| Iambic | u/ |
| Trochaic | /u |
| Anapestic | uu/ |
| Dactylic | /uu |
| Spondaic | // |
| Scansion | To determine meter |
| Stanza | groups of line in a poem |
| Sonnet | 14 line poet with a particular line scheme |
| Rhymed verse | poetry that rhyme |
| Blank Verse | unrhymed iambic pentameter |
| Free Verse | No Rhyme or meter |
| Couplet | 2 lines of poetry |
| Triplet | 3 lines of poetry |
| Quatrain | 4 lines of poetry |
| Quintet | 5 lines of poetry |
| Sestet | 6 lines of poetry |
| Septet | 7 lines of poetry |
| Octave | 8 lines of poetry |
| Dimeter | A line of verses with 2 feet |
| Trimeter | A line of verses with 3 feet |
| Tetrameter | A line of verses with 4 feet |
| Pentameter | A line of verses with 5 feet |
| Hexameter | A line of verses with 6 feet |
| Heptameter | A line of verses with 7 feet |
| Octameter | A line of verses with 8 feet |
Combine with other sets
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