- Characterization:: The method an author uses to reveal characters and their various personalities.
- Compare:: Place together characters, situations or ideas to show common or differing features in literary selections.
- Conventions of language:: Mechanics, usage and sentence completeness.
- Focus:: The center of interest or attention.
- Graphic organizer: A diagram or pictorial device that shows relationships.
- Meter: The repetition of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry.
- Narrative: A story, actual or fictional, expressed orally or in writing.
- Paraphrase: Restate text or passage in other words, often to clarify meaning or show understanding.
- Pattern book: A book with a predictable language structure and often written with predictable text; also known as predictable book.
- Point of view: The way in which an author reveals characters, events and ideas in telling a story; the vantage point from which the story is told.
- Research: A systematic inquiry into a subject or problem in order to discover, verify or revise relevant facts or principles having to do with that subject or problem.
- Satire: A literary tone used to ridicule or make fun of human vice or weakness.
- Secondary Sources: Text and/or artifacts used when researching that are derived from something original.
- Sources Primary: Text and/or artifacts that tell or show a first-hand account of an event; original works used when researching.
- Style: How an author writes; an author’s use of language; its effects and appropriateness to the author’s intent andtheme.
- Theme: A topic of discussion or writing; a major idea broad enough to cover the entire scope of a literary work.
- Thesis: The basic argument advanced by a speaker or writer who then attempts to prove it; the subject or major argument of a speech or composition.
- Tone: The attitude of the author toward the audience and characters (e.g., serious or humorous).
- Voice: The fluency, rhythm and liveliness in writing that makes it unique to the writer.
Writing terms