| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Voice | Distinctive features of a person's speech and speech patterns. |
| Tone | The overall feeling created by an author's use of words. |
| Point of View | The perspective from which a story is told. |
| Narrative Point of View | The perspective from which the story is told - four choices: first person; 3rd person (dramatic, objective); 3rd person omniscient; 3rd person limited omniscient. |
| Diction | An author's choice of words based on their clearness, conciseness, effectiveness, and authenticity. |
| Mood | The feeling a text evokes in the reader, such as sadness, tranquility, or elation. |
| Allusion | A reference to a familiar person, place, thing, or event—for example, Don Juan, brave new world, Everyman, Machiavellian, utopia. |
| Irony | The use of a word or phrase to mean the exact opposite of its literal or expected meaning. There are three types....Dramatic, Verbal, Situation. |
| Hyperbole | A figure of speech in which exaggeration is used for emphasis or effect, as in I could sleep for a year or this book weighs a ton. |
| Foreshadowing | A literary technique in which the author gives hints or clues about what is to come at some point later in the story. |
| Meter | A rhythmical pattern in verse that is made up of stressed and unstressed syllables. |
| Phrase | Two or more words in sequence that form a syntactic unit that is less than a complete sentence. |
| Clause | A group of words containing a subject and a predicate and forming part of a compound or complex sentence. |
| Euphemism | The act or an example of substituting a mild, indirect, or vague term for one considered harsh, blunt, or offensive. |
| Connotation | The set of associations implied by a word in addition to its literal meaning. |
| Denotation | The most specific or direct meaning of a word, in contrast to its figurative or associated meanings. |
| Holistic Scoring | A method by which trained readers evaluate a piece of writing for its overall quality. There is no focus on one aspect of the writing. |
| Alliteration | The repetition of initial consonant sounds in words, such a "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers." |
| Analogy | A comparison of objects or ideas that appear to be different but are alike in some important way. |
| 4 sentence types | Simple, compound (conjunctions), complex (subordination), compound-complex (conjunctions and subordination). |
| Allegory | A story in which people (or things or actions) represent an idea or a generalization about life. Usually have a strong lesson or moral. |
| Anapestic Meter | Meter that is composed of feet that are short-short-long or unaccented-unaccented-accented, usually used in light or whimsical poetry, such as limerick. |
| Anecdote | A brief story that illustrates or makes a point. |
| Antagonist | A person or thing working against the hero of a literary work (the protagonist). |
| Aphorism | A wise saying, usually short and written. |
| Apostrophe | A turn from the general audience to address a specific group of persons (or a personified abstraction) who is present of absent. For example, in a recent performance of Shakespeare's Hamlet, Hamlet turned to the audience and spoke directly to one woman about his father's death. |
| Assonance | A repetition of the same sound in words close to one another—for example, white stripes. |
| Blank verse | Unrhymed verse, often occurring in iambic pentameter. |
| Caesura | A break in the rhythm of language, particularly a natural pause in a in a line of verse, maked in prosody by a double vertical line ( || ). Ex. Arma virumque cano, || Troiae qui primus ab oris . |
| Characterization | A method an author uses to let readers know more about the characters and their personal traits. |
| Cliché | An expression that has been used so often that it loses its expressive power—for example, "dead as a doornail" or "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse." |
| Connosance | Repetition of the final consonant sound in words containing different vowels—for example, "stroke of luck." |
| Couplet | A stanza made up of two rhyming lines. |
| Archaic | Old-fashioned words that are no longer used in common speech, such as thee, thy, and thou. |
| Colloquialisms (diction) | Expressions that are usually accepted in informal situations or regions, such as "wicked awesome." |
| Dialect | A variety of a language used by people from a particular geographic area. |
| Jargon | Specialized language used in a particular field or content area—for example, educational _____ includes differentiated instruction, cooperative learning, and authentic assessment. |
| Profanity (diction) | Language that shows disrespect for others or something sacred. |
| Slang (diction) | Informal language used by a particular group of people among themselves. |
| Vulgarity | Language widely considered crude, disgusting, and oftentimes offensive. |
| End rhyme | Rhyming of the ends of lines of verse. |
| Enjambment | Also known as a run-on line in poetry, _____ occurs when one line ends and continues onto the next line to complete meaning. For example the first line in Thoreau's poem "My life has been the poem I would have writ," and the second line completes the meaning—"but I could not both live and utter it." |
| Existentialism | A philosophy that values human freedom and personal responsibility. A few well known _______ writers are Jean-Paul Satre, Soren Kierkegaard ("the father of _______"), Albert Camus, Freidrich Nietzche, Franz Kafka, and Simone de Beauvoir. |
| Flashback | A literacy device in which the author jumps back in time in the chronology of narrative. |
| Foot | A metrical ______ is defined as one stressed syllable and a number of unstressed syllables (from zero to as many as four). Stressed syllables are indicated by the ΄ symbol. Unstressed syllables are indicated by the ⌣ symbol. There are four possible types....Iambic: ˘ ΄ (unstressed, stressed), Trochaic: ΄ ˘ (stressed, unstressed), Anapestic: ˘ ˘ ΄ (unstressed, unstressed, stressed), and Dactylic: ΄ ˘ ˘ (stressed, unstressed, unstressed). |
| Free verse | Verse that contains an irregular metrical pattern and line length; also known as vers libre. |
| Genre | A category of literature defined by its style, form, and content. |
| Heroic couplet | A pair of lines of poetic verse written in iambic pentameter. |
| Hubris | The flaw that leads to the downfall of a tragic hero; this term comes from the Greek word hybris, which means "excessive pride." |
| Imagery | The use of words to create pictures in the reader's mind. |
| Internal rhyme | Rhyme that occurs within a line of verse. |
| Malapropism | A type of pun, or play on words, that results when two words become mixed up in the speaker's mind—for example, "Don't put the horse before the cart." |
| Metaphor | A figure of speech in which a comparison is implied but not stated, such as "This winter is a bear." |
| Moral | A lesson a work of literature is teaching. |
| Narration | The telling of a story. |
| Onomatopoeia | The use of sound words to suggest meaning, as in buzz, click, or vroom. |
| Oxymoron | A phrase that consists of two contradictory terms—for example, "deafening silence." |
| Paradox | A contradictory statement that makes sense—for example, "Man learns from history that man learns nothing from history." |
| Personification | A literary device in which animals, ideas, and things are represented as having human traits. |
| First Person | The story is told from the point of view of one character. |
| Third Person | The story is told by someone outside the story. |
| Omniscient | The narrator shares the thoughts and feelings of all the characters. |
| Limited omniscient | The narrator shares the thoughts and feelings of one (or a few) character(s). |
| Camera view | The narrator records the actions from his or her point of view, unaware of any of the other characters' thoughts or feelings. Also known as the objective view. |
| Refrain | The repetition of a line or phrase of a poem at regular intervals, particularly at the end of each stanza. |
| Repetition | The multiple use of a word, phrase, or idea for emphasis or rhythmic effect. |
| Rhetoric | Persuasive writing. |
| Rhythm | The regular or random occurrence of sound in poetry. |
| Setting | The time and place in which the action of a story takes place. |
| Simile | A comparison of two unlike things, usually including the word like or as. |
| Style | How the author uses words, phrases, and sentences to form ideas. |
| Symbol | A person, place, thing, or event used to represent something else, such as the white flag that represents surrender. |
| Transcendentalism | During the mid-19th century in New England, several writers and intellectuals worked together to write, translate works, and publish. Their philosophy focused on protesting the Puritan ethic and materialism. They valued individualism, freedom, experimentation, and spirituality. Noted individuals of this philosophy included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. |
| Verse | A metric line of poetry. Its name is based on the kind and number of feet composing it ("foot"). |
| Ballad | A short poem, often written by an anonymous author, comprised of short verses intended to be sung or recited. |
| Canto | The main section of a long poem. |
| Elegy | A poem that is a mournful lament for the dead. Examples include William Shakespeare's "Eligy" from Cymbeline, Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem," and Alfred Lord Tennysone's "In Memoriam." |
| Epic | A long narrative poem detailing a hero's deeds. Examples include The Aenied by Vergil, The Illiad and The Odyssey by Homer, Beowulf, Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longellow. |
| Haiku | A type of Japanese poem that is written in 17 syllables with three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively. Expresses a single thought. |
| Limerick | A humorous verse form of five anapestic (Composed of feet that are short-short-long or unaccented-unaccented-accented) lines with rhyme scheme of aabba. |
| Lyric | A short poem about personal feelings and emotions. |
| Sonnet | A fourteen-line poem, usually written in iambic pentameter, with a varied rhyme scheme. Two main types are Petrarchan (or Italian) and the Shakespearean (or English). A Petrarchan opens with an octave that states a proposition and ends with a sestet that states the solution. A Shakespearean includes three quatrains and a couplet. |
| Stanza | A division of poetry named for the number of lines it contains...Couplet: Two-lines, Triplet: Three-lines, Quatrain: Four-lines, Quintet: Five-lines, Sestet: Six-lines, Septet: Seven-lines, Octave: Eight-lines. |
| Fable | A short story or folktale that contains a moral, which may be expressed explicitly at the end as a maxim. Examples include The Country Mouse and the Town Mouse, The Tortoise and the Hare, and The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing. |
| Fairy Tale | A narrative that is made up of fantastic characters and creatures, such as witches, goblins, and fairies, and usually begins with the phrase "Once upon a time..." Examples include Rapunzel, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Little Red Riding Hood. |
| Fantasy | A genre that uses magic and other supernatural forms as a primary element of plot, theme, and/or setting. Examples include J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, and William Morris' The Well at the World's End. |
| Folktale | A narrative form, such as an epic, legend, myth, song, poem, or fable, that has been retold within a culture for generations. Examples include The People Couldn't Fly retold by Virginia Hamilton and And Green Grass Grew All Around by Alvin Schwartz. |
| Frame tale | A narrative technique in which the main story is composed primarily for the purpose of organizing a set of shorter stories, each of which is a story within a story. Examples include Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. |
| Historical fiction | Narrative fiction that is set in some earlier time and often contains historically authentic people, places, or events—for example, Lincoln by Gore Vidal. |
| Horror | Fiction that is intended to frighten, unsettle, or scare the reader. Often overlaps with fantasy and science fiction. Examples include Stephen King's The Shining, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. |
| Legend | A narrative about human actions that is perceived by both the teller and the listeners to have taken place within human history and that possesses certain qualities that give the tale the appearance of truth or reality. Washington Irvin's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a well-known example; others include King Arthur and The Holy Grail. |
| Mystery | A suspenseful story that deals with a puzzling crime. Examples include Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murder in Rue Morgue" and Charles Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood. |
| Myth | Narrative fiction that involves gods and heroes or has a theme that expresses a culture's ideology. Examples of Greek ______ include Zeus and the Olympians and The Trojan War. Roman ______ include Hercules, Apollo, and Venus. |
| Novel | An extended fictional prose narrative. |
| Novella | A short narrative, usually between 50 and 100 pages long. Examples include George Orwell's Animal Farm and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. |
| Parody | A text or performance that imitates and mocks an author or work. |
| Romance | A novel comprised of idealized events far removed from everyday life. This genre includes the subgenres of gothic ____ and medieval ____. Examples include Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, and King Horn (anonymous). |
| Satire | Literature that makes fun of social conventions or conditions, usually to evoke change. |
| Science fiction | Deals with current or future development of technological advances. Examples are Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. |
| Short story | A brief fictional prose narrative. Examples include Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," Washington Irving's "Rip van Winkle" D.H. Lawrence's "The Horse Dealer's Daughter," Arthur Conan Doyle's "Hound of the Baskervilles," and Dorothy Parker's "Big Blond." |
| Tragedy | Literature, often drama, ending in a catastrophic event for the protagonist(s) after he or she faces several problems or conflicts. |
| Western | A novel set in the western U.S. featuring the experiences of cowboys and frontiersmen. Examples include Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage and Trail Driver, Larry McMurty's Lonesome Dove, Conrad Richter's The Sea of Grass, Fran Striker's The Lone Ranger, and Owen Wister's The Virginian. |
| Autobiography | A person's account of his or hew own life. |
| Biography | A story about a person's life written by another person. |
| Document (letter, diary, journal) | An expository piece written with eloquence that becomes part of the recognized literature of an era. Often reveal historical facts, the social mores of the times, and the thoughts and personality of the author. Some have recorded and influenced the history of the world. Examples include the Bible, the Koran, the Constitution of the United States, and Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. |
| Essay | A document organized in paragraph form that can be long or short and can be in the form of a letter, dialogue, or discussion. Examples include Politics and the English Language by George Orwell, The American Scholar by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Moral Essays by Alexander Pope. |
| Dialect | A variation of a language used by people who live in a particular geographical area. |
| Phonetics | The study of the sounds of language and their physical properties. |
| Phonology | The analysis of how sounds function in a language or dialect. |
| Morphology | The study of the structure of words. |
| Semantics | The study of the meaning in language. |
| Syntax | The study of the structure of sentences. |
| Pragmatics | The role of context in the interpretation of meaning. |
| Participle | A verb form that usually ends in –ing or –ed. |
| Ambiguity | Occurs when there are two or more possible meanings to a word or phrase. |
| Euphemism | A socially accepted word or phrase used to replace unacceptable language, such as expressions for bodily functions or body parts. Also used as substitutes for straightforward words to tactfully conceal or falsify meaning. Ex. My grandmother passed away last April. |
| Double speak | Language that is intended to be evasive or to conceal. Ex. "downsized" actually means fired or loss of job. |
| Jargon | The specialized language of a particular group or culture. Ex. in the field of education...rubric, tuning protocol, and deskilling. |
| Dialect | A variation of a language used by people who live in a particular geographical area. |
| Antagonist | A person who opposes or competes with the main character (protagonist); often the villain in the story. |
| Character | A person or being in a narrative |
| Conflict | Opposing elements or characters in a plot. |
| Denouement | The outcome or resolution of plot in a story. |
| Plot | The structure of a work of literature; the sequence of events. |
| Protagonist | The main character or hero of a written work. |
| Setting | The time and place in which a story occurs. |
| Noun | a word which names a person, place or thing. Ex. boy, river, friend, Mexico, triangle, day, school, truth, university, idea, John F. Kennedy, movie |
| Verb | a word which shows action or state of being. Ex. In the sentence The dog bit the man, bit is the ____. |
| Adjective | - a word which describes or gives more information about a noun or pronoun. Ex. The lazy dog sat on the rug, the word lazy is an ____ which gives more information about the noun dog. |
| Adverb | a word that gives more information about a noun or pronoun. Ex. Sue runs very fast, very describes the ____ fast and gives information about how fast Sue runs. |
| Pronoun | a word which can be used instead of a noun. Ex instead of saying John is a student, the ____ he can be used in place of the noun John and the sentence becomes He is a student. |
| Preposition | a word which shows relationships among other words in the sentence. The relationships include direction, place, time, cause, manner and amount Ex. In the sentence He came by bus, "by" is a _____ which shows manner. |
| Conjunction | a word that connects other words or groups of words. Ex. In the sentence Bob and Dan are friends, the _____ "and" connects two nouns and in the sentence. |
| Article | a kind of adjective which is always used with and gives some information about a noun. There are only two _____ a and the. |
Combine with other sets
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