| 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 |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Colloquialism | A word or phrase used in everyday conversational English that isn't a part of accepted "school-book" English. |
| Conceit (Controlling Image) | A startling or unusual metaphor, or 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. |
| 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 |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Hyperbole | Exaggeration or deliberate overstatement. |
| Implicit | To say or write something that suggests but never says directly or clearly. |
| Interior Monologue | Refers to writing (in prose) that records the mental talking that goes on inside a character |
| Inversion | Switching the customary order of elements in a sentence or phrase. |
| Lament | A poem of sadness or grief over the death of a loved one or over some other intense loss. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Parenthetical phrase | A phrase set off by commas that interrupts the flow of a sentence with some commentary or added detail. |
| Pastoral | A poem set in tranquil nature or even more specifically, one about shepherds. |
| Personification | When an inanimate object takes on human shape. |
| Plaint | A poem or speech expressing sorrow. |
| Stream of Consciousness | Author places the reader inside the main character's head and sees every thought as it goes through the character's head |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Stanza | A group of lines roughly analogous in function in verse to the paragraphs function in prose. |
| Subjunctive Mood | A grammatical situation involving the words "if" and "were," setting up a hypothetical situation. |
| Suggest | To imply, infer, indicate. |
| Suspension of disbelief | The demand made of a theater audience to accept the limitations of staging and supply the details with their imagination. |
| limited omniscient narrator | a third person narrator who reports what one character (usually the protagonist) sees, and who only reports the thoughts of that one privileged character |
| Elements of short stories | characters, irony, theme, symbol, plot, setting |
| elements of poetry | figurative language, symbol, imagery, rhythm, rhyme |
| elements of drama | conflict, characters, climax, conclusion, exposition, rising action, falling action, sets, props |
| elements of non-fiction | argument, evidence, reason, appeals, fallacies, thesis |
| pathetic fallacy | when an emotion or feeling is attached to something inanimate, particularly things in nature |
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