| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Alliteration | repitition of initial consonant sounds (seven snakes slithered), use of the same consonant at the beginning of each stressed syllable in a line of verse |
| Allusion | indirect reference in speech and writing to a person, character or legend. , A reference to someone or something that is known form hitory, literature, religion, politics, sports, science, or some other branch of culture. |
| Ambiguity | a technique by which a writer deliberately suggests two or more different, and sometimes conflicting, meanings in a work. |
| Anti-climax | A gradual or sudden decrease in the importance or impressiveness of what is said. |
| Antithesis | the juxtaposition of contrasting words or ideas to give a feeling of balance |
| Antonym | a word that means the opposite of another word |
| Assonance | the repetition of similar vowels in the stressed syllables of successive words |
| Auxiliary verb | one that helps another verb to form a vioce (be, have, shall, will, may, do) |
| Clause | a word or group of words ordinarily consisting of a subject and a predicate |
| Cliche | an overused saying or idea |
| Climax | The highpoint of interest or suspense in a novel, story, or play. |
| Colloquial | Refers to a type of informal casual, conversational language. |
| Dialect | a way of speaking that is characteristic of a certain social group or of the inhabitants of a certain geographical area. |
| Direct Speech | words of a speaker as they are actually spoken (he said "wake up...") speech marks are a must. |
| Ellipsis | omission of words from a text; mark used to indicate an omission (when the meaning can be understood without them) |
| Eulogy | expression of praise(often on someone’s death) |
| Explicit | totally clear; definite; outspoken |
| Feedback | response to an inquiry or experiment |
| Figuative Language | non literal or imaginitive symbolic meaning of a word which draws aon personal and memory associations |
| Generalisation | an idea having general application |
| Homonyms | two words are this if they are pronounced or spelled the same way but have different meanings |
| Homophones | sound exactly alike, but have different spellings and meanings |
| Hyperbole | a figure of speech that uses exaggeration to express strong emotion, make a point, or evoke humor |
| Idiom | an expression to a particular language that means something different from the literal meaning of each word |
| Imperative | a command form of a verb (Shut the door!) |
| Imagery | the use of language to evoke a picture or a concrete sensation of a person, a thing, a place, or an experience |
| Implicit | understood but not stated; implied; unquestioning and complete; meaning is hidden |
| Indirect speech | speech reported in third person (jimmy said he wanted to go to the movies) |
| Irony | incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs |
| Jargon | specialized technical terminology characteristic of a particular subject |
| Metaphor | A figure of speech in which one object is likened to another, by speaking as if the other. |
| Minor sentence | Begins with a capital letter and ends in a full stop. Has no completed verb.makes no sense on its own |
| Narrative | telling of events |
| Noun | a word that can be used to refer to a person or place or thing |
| Onomatopoeia | using words that imitate the sound they denote |
| Oxymoron | conjoining contradictory terms (as in 'deafening silence') |
| Parts of speech | different kinds of words in terms of their functions in a sentence |
| Personification | representing an abstract quality or idea as a person or creature |
| Phrase | a group of words which make a unit acting as a noun, adjective or adverb. it does not contain a finite verb (subject or predicate) and does not make complete sense of itself. (in a hurry) |
| pitch | variation of expresion out of keeping with the subject manner. |
| Prefix | an affix that added in front of the word (dis-, un- etc.) |
| Pun | a humorous play on words |
| Pronoun | a function word that is used in place of a noun or noun phrase |
| Rhetorical Question | a statement that is formulated as a question but that is not supposed to be answered |
| Rhyme | A situation in which words sound identical or very similar and appear in parallel positions in two or more lines of poetry. |
| Sarcasm | witty language used to convey insults or scorn, satire |
| Simple sentence | sentence with only one subject and one predicate; called this even if there is a compound subject and/or a compound predicate, a sentence having no coordinate clauses or subordinate clauses |
| Compound sentence | has two or more clauses of equal value linked by a conjunction |
| Complex sentence | has at least one main clause and at least one subordinate clause |
| Compound complex sentence | has more than one main clause and at least one subordinate clause |
| Stereotypes | generalized beliefs about what members of an identifiable group are like that operate as schemas when perceiving members of those groups |
| Stress | intensity of utterance, special emphasis on a sound or sound group |
| style | the matter in which something is written |
| Subordinate clause | in a complex sentence that cannot stand alone as a complete sentence and that functions within the sentence as a noun or adjective or adverb |
| Synonym | words of the same language having roughly the same idea in a paragraph, large and great are synonyms |
| Topic sentence | First sentence of a body paragraph that states the focus of the paragraph. It is followed by supporting details. |
| Vocabulary | a language user's knowledge of words |
| wit | an ingenious form of word-play or intellectual form of humour |
Combine with other sets
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