| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Abstract | Complex, discusses intangible qualities like good and evil, seldom uses examples to support its points. |
| Academic | Dry and rhetorical writing; sucking all the life out of its subject with analysis. |
| Accent | In poetry, the stressed portion of a word. |
| Aesthetic | Appealing to the senses; a coherent sense of taste. |
| Allegory | A story in which each aspect of the story has a symbolic meaning outside the tale itself. |
| Alliteration | The repetition of initial consonant sounds. |
| Allusion | A reference to another work or famous figure. |
| Anachronism | "Misplaced in time." An aspect of a story that doesn't belong in its supposed time setting. |
| Analogy | A comparison, usually involving two or more symbolic parts, employed to clarify an action or a relationship. |
| Anecdote | A Short Narrative |
| Antecedent | The word, phrase, or clause that determines what a pronoun refers to. |
| Anthropomorphism | When inanimate objects are given human characteristics. Often confused with personification. |
| Anticlimax | Occurs when an action produces far smaller results than one had been led to expect. |
| Antihero | A protagonist who is markedly unheroic: morally weak, cowardly, dishonest, or any number of other unsavory qualities. |
| Aphorism | A short and usually witty saying. |
| Apostrophe | A figure of speech wherein the speaker talks directly to something that is nonhuman. |
| Archaism | The use of deliberately old-fashioned language. |
| Aside | A speech (usually just a short comment) made by an actor to the audience, as though momentarily stepping outside of the action on stage. |
| Aspect | A trait or characteristic |
| Assonance | The repeated use of vowel sounds: "Old king Cole was a merry old soul." |
| Atmosphere | The emotional tone or background that surrounds a scene |
| Ballad | A long, narrative poem, usually in meter and rhyme. Typically has a naive folksy quality. |
| Bathos | Writing strains for grandeur it can't support and tries too hard to be a tear jerker. |
| Pathos | Writing evokes feelings of dignified pity and sympathy. |
| Black humor | The use of disturbing themes in comedy. |
| Bombast | Pretentious, exaggeratedly learned language. |
| Burlesque | Broad parody, one that takes a style or form and exaggerates it into ridiculousness. |
| Cacophony | In poetry, using deliberately harsh, awkward sounds. |
| Cadence | The beat or rhythm or poetry in a general sense. |
| Canto | The name for a section division in a long work of poetry. |
| Caricature | A portrait (verbal or otherwise) that exaggerates a facet of personality. |
| Catharsis | Drawn from Aristotle's writings on tragedy. Refers to the "cleansing" of emotion an audience member experiences during a play |
| Chorus | In Greek drama, the group of citizens who stand outside the main action on stage and comment on it. |
| Classic | Typical, or an accepted masterpiece. |
| Coinage (neologism) | A new word, usually one invented on the spot. |
| Colloquialism | A word or phrase used in everyday conversational English that isn't a part of accepted "school-book" English. |
| Complex (Dense) | Suggesting that there is more than one possibility in the meaning of words; subtleties and variations; multiple layers of interpretation; meaning both explicit and implicit |
| Conceit (Controlling Image) | A startling or unusual metaphor, or to a metaphor developed and expanded upon several lines. |
| Denotation | A word's literal meaning. |
| Connotation | Everything other than the literal meaning that a word suggests or implies. |
| Consonance | The repetition of consonant sounds within words (rather than at their beginnings) |
| Couplet | A pair of lines that end in rhyme |
| Decorum | A character's speech must be styled according to her social station, and in accordance to the situation. |
| Diction | The words an author chooses to use. |
| Syntax | The ordering and structuring of words. |
| Dirge | A song for the dead. Its tone is typically slow, heavy, depressed, and melancholy |
| Dissonance | Refers to the grating of incompatible sounds. |
| Doggerel | Crude, simplistic verse, often in sing-song rhyme, like limericks. |
| Dramatic Irony | When the audience knows something that the characters in the drama do not |
| Dramatic Monologue | When a single speaker in literature says something to a silent audience. |
| Elegy | A type of poem that meditates on death or mortality in a serious, thoughtful manner. |
| Elements | Basic techniques of each genre of literature |
| Enjambment | The continuation of a syntactic unit from one line or couplet of a poem to the next with no pause. |
| Epic | A very long narrative poem on a serious theme in a dignified style; typically deal with glorious or profound subject matter. |
| Epitaph | Lines that commemorate the dead at their burial place. |
| Euphemism | A word or phrase that takes the place of a harsh, unpleasant, or impolite reality. |
| Euphony | When sounds blend harmoniously. |
| Explicit | To say or write something directly and clearly. |
| Farce | Extremely broad humor; in earlier times, a funny play or a comedy. |
| Feminine rhyme | Lines rhymed by their final two syllables. Properly, the penultimate syllables are stressed and the final syllables are unstressed. |
| Foil | A secondary character whose purpose is to highlight the characteristics of a main character, usually by contrast. |
| Foot | The basic rhythmic unit of a line of poetry, formed by a combination of two or three syllables, either stressed or unstressed. |
| Foreshadowing | An event of statement in a narrative that in miniature suggests a larger event that comes later. |
| Free verse | poetry written without a regular rhyme scheme or metrical pattern |
| Genre | A sub-category of literature. |
| Gothic | A sensibility that includes such features as dark, gloomy castles and weird screams from the attic each night. |
| Hubris | The excessive pride or ambition that leads to the main character's downfall |
| Hyperbole | Exaggeration or deliberate overstatement. |
| Implicit | To say or write something that suggests and implies but never says it directly or clearly. |
| In media res | Latin for "in the midst of things," i.e. beginning an epic poem in the middle of the action. |
| Interior Monologue | Refers to writing that records the mental talking that goes on inside a character's head; tends to be coherent. |
| Inversion | Switching the customary order of elements in a sentence or phrase. |
| Irony | A statement that means the opposite of what it seems to mean; uses an undertow of meaning, sliding against the literal a la Jane Austen. |
| Lament | A poem of sadness or grief over the death of a loved one or over some other intense loss. |
| Lampoon | A satire. |
| Loose sentence | A sentence that is complete before its end: Jack loved Barbara despite her irritating snorting laugh. |
| Periodic Sentence | A sentence that is not grammatically complete until it has reached it s final phrase: Despite Barbara's irritation at Jack, she loved him. |
| Lyric | A type of poetry that explores the poet's personal interpretation of and feelings about the world. |
| Masculine rhyme | A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable (regular old rhyme) |
| Meaning | What makes sense, what's important. |
| Melodrama | A form of cheesy theater in which the hero is very, very good, the villain mean and rotten, and the heroine oh-so-pure. |
| Metaphor | A comparison or analogy that states one thing IS another. |
| Simile | A comparison or analogy that typically uses like or as. |
| Metonymy | A word that is used to stand for something else that it has attributes of or is associated with. |
| Nemesis | The protagonist's arch enemy or supreme and persistent difficulty. |
| Objectivity | Treatment of subject matter in an impersonal manner or from an outside view. |
| Subjectivity | A treatment of subject matter that uses the interior or personal view of a single observer and is typically colored with that observer's emotional responses. |
| Onomatopoeia | Words that sound like what they mean |
| Opposition | A pairing of images whereby each becomes more striking and informative because it's placed in contrast to the other one. |
| Oxymoron | A phrase composed of opposites; a contradiction. |
| Parable | A story that instructs. |
| Paradox | A situation or statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection, does not. |
| Parallelism | Repeated syntactical similarities used for effect. |
| Paraphrase | To restate phrases and sentences in your own words. |
| Parenthetical phrase | A phrase set off by commas that interrupts the flow of a sentence with some commentary or added detail. |
| Parody | The work that results when a specific work is exaggerated to ridiculousness. |
| Pastoral | A poem set in tranquil nature or even more specifically, one about shepherds. |
| Persona | The narrator in a non first-person novel. |
| Personification | When an inanimate object takes on human shape. |
| Plaint | A poem or speech expressing sorrow. |
| Point of View | The perspective from which the action of a novel is presented. |
| Omniscient | A third person narrator who sees into each character's mind and understands all the action going on. |
| Limited Omniscient | A Third person narrator who generally reports only what one character sees, and who only reports the thoughts of that one privileged character. |
| Objective | A thrid person narrator who only reports on what would be visible to a camera. Does not know what the character is thinking unless the character speaks it. |
| First person | A narrator who is a character in the story and tells the tale from his or her point of view. |
| Stream of Consciousness | Author places the reader inside the main character's head and makes the reader privy to all of the character's thoughts as they scroll through her consciousness. |
| Prelude | An introductory poem to a longer work of verse |
| Protagonist | The main character of a novel or play |
| Pun | The usually humorous use of a word in such a way to suggest two or more meanings |
| Refrain | A line or set of lines repeated several times over the course of a poem. |
| Requiem | A song of prayer for the dead. |
| Rhapsody | An intensely passionate verse or section of verse, usually of love or praise. |
| Rhetorical question | A question that suggests an answer. |
| Satire | Attempts to improve things by pointing out people's mistakes in the hope that once exposed, such behavior will become less common. |
| Soliloquy | A speech spoken by a character alone on stage, meant to convey the impression that the audience is listening to the character's thoughts. |
| Stanza | A group of lines roughly analogous in function in verse to the paragraphs function in prose. |
| Stock characters | Standard or cliched character types. |
| Subjunctive Mood | A grammatical situation involving the words "if" and "were," setting up a hypothetical situation. |
| Suggest | To imply, infer, indicate. |
| Summary | A simple retelling of what you've just read. |
| Suspension of disbelief | The demand made of a theater audience to accept the limitations of staging and supply the details with their imagination. |
| Symbolism | A device in literature where an object represents an idea. |
| Technique | The methods and tools of the author. |
| Theme | The main idea of the overall work; the central idea. |
| Thesis | The main position of an argument. The central contention that will be supported. |
| Tragic flaw | In a tragedy, this is the weakness of a character in an otherwise good (or even great) individual that ultimately leads to his demise. |
| Travesty | A grotesque parody |
| Truism | A way-too obvious truth |
| Unreliable narrator | When the first person narrator is crazy, a liar, very young, or for some reason not entirely credible |
| Utopia | An idealized place. Imaginary communities in which people are able to live in happiness, prosperity, and peace. |
| Zeugma | The use of a word to modify two or more words, but used for different meanings. He closed the door and his heart on his lost love. |
| Ode | A poem in praise of something divine or noble |
| Iamb | A poetic foot -- light, heavy |
| Trochee | A poetic foot -- heavy, light |
| Spondee | A poetic foot -- heavy, heavy |
| Pyrrhic | A poetic foot -- light, light |
| Anapest | A poetic foot -- light, light, heavy |
| Ambibrach | A poetic foot -- light, heavy, light |
| Dactyl | A poetic foot -- heavy, light, light |
| Imperfect | A poetic foot -- single light or single heavy |
| Pentameter | A poetic line with five feet. |
| Tetrameter | A poetic line with four feet |
| Trimeter | A poetic line with three feet |
| Blank Verse | unrhymed iambic pentameter. |
| heroic couplet | two line rhymes in iambic pentameter |
| caesura | a pause |
| synecdoche | a form of metonymy which refers to a specific part to refer to the whole or vice versa |
Combine with other sets
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