| Term | Definition |
|---|
| alliteration | the repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning or in the middle of two or more adjacent words |
| allusion | a reference in a written or spoken text to another text or to some particular body of knowledge |
| anecdote | a brief narrative offered in a text to capture the audience's attention or to support a generalization or claim |
| connotation | the implied meaning of a word |
| denotation | the "dictionary definition" of a word |
| dialect | the describable patterns of language--grammar and vocabulary--used by a particular cultural or ethnic population |
| euphemism | an indirect expression of unpleasant information in such a way as to lessen its impact--for example, saying a person's position was eliminated rather than saying the person was fired. |
| extended analogy | an extended passage arguing that if two things are similar in one or two ways, they are probably similar in other ways as well |
| hyperbole | an exaggeration for effect |
| imagery | language that evokes particular sensations or emotionally rich experiences in a reader |
| implied metaphor | a metaphor embedded in a sentence rather than expressed directly as a sentence. For example, "His voice cascaded through the hallways" rather than "His voice was a cascade of emotion." |
| irony | writing or speaking that implies the contrary of what is actually written or spoken |
| metaphor | an implied comparison that does not use the word like or as |
| mood | the feeling that a text is intended to produce in the audience |
| oxymoron | juxtaposed words with seemingly contrdictory meanings--for example, "jumbo shrimp" |
| paradox | a statement that seems untrue on the surface but is true nonetheless |
| parallelism | a set of similarly structured words, phrases, or clauses that appears in a sentence or paragraph |
| personification | the giving of human characteristics to inanimate objects |
| point of view | the perspective or source of a piece of writing. A first-person POV has a narrator or speaker who refers to himself or herself as "I." A third-person POV lacks such as "I" in its perspective. |
| simile | a type of comparison that uses the word like or as |
| symbol | in a text, an element that stands for more than itself and, therefore, helps to convey a theme of the text |
| theme | the message conveyed by a literary work |
| thesis | the main idea in a text, often the main generalization, conclusion, or claim |
| tone | the writer's or speaker's attitude toward the subject matter |
| voice | the textual features, such as diction and sentence structure, that convey a writer's or speaker's persona |
Combine with other sets
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