| Term | Definition |
|---|
| 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. |
| Apostrophe | A figure of speech wherein the speaker talks directly to something that is nonhuman. |
| Assonance | The repeated use of vowel sounds: "Old king Cole was a merry old soul." |
| Catharsis | Drawn from Aristotle's writings on tragedy. Refers to the "cleansing" of emotion an audience member experiences during a play |
| 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. |
| Diction | The words an author chooses to use. |
| Syntax | The ordering and structuring of words. |
| Elegy | A type of poem that meditates on death or mortality in a serious, thoughtful manner. |
| Enjambment | The continuation of a syntactic unit from one line or couplet of a poem to the next with no pause. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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 |
| Suspension of disbelief | The demand made of a theater audience to accept the limitations of staging and supply the details with their imagination. |
| pathetic fallacy | when an emotion or feeling is attached to something inanimate, particularly things in nature |
| cadence | rhythmic rise and fall (of words or sounds); beat; regular beat of sound; rhythm |
| consonance | the repetition of consonants (or consonant patterns) especially at the ends of words |
| lyric | A short poem that expresses the personal feelings and thoughts of a single speaker |
| loose sentence | a type of sentence in which the main idea (independent clause) comes first; the base of the sentence comes first and the loose bits are at the end |
| periodic sentence | a sentence that is not complete until the end. it has some loose stuff in the front and an independent clause at the end |
| parallelism | the repetition of words or phrases that have similar grammatical structure |
| Objective point of view | also movie camera; the reader only sees that which someone else watching would: no inner thoughts |
| satire | A type of writing that ridicules (usually in a very witty, sarcastic way) the shortcomings of people or institutions in an attemmpt to bring about a change. |
| English Sonnet | a fourteen line poem in iambic pentameter; rhyme structure is usually ababcdcdefefgg |
| Italian Sonnet | a fourteen line poem in iambic pentameter; CAN NOT end in a couplet; rhyme structure is usually something like abbaabba cdcdcd or cdecde |
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