| A | B |
|---|
| Alliteration | The repetition of consonant sounds in words that are close to one another. |
| Allusion | a reference to a statement, person, place, event, or thing that is known from literature, history, religion, myth, politics, sports, science, or pop culture. |
| Anachronism | an event or detail in literary work that is placed outside its proper historical time period. |
| Aside | private words that a character in a play speaks to the audience or to another character, which are not supposed to be overheard by others onstage. |
| Assonance | the repetition of similar vowel sounds followed by different constant sounds in words that are close together. |
| Atmosphere | the mood or feeling in a work of literature. |
| Autobiography | an account of a person’s own life. |
| Ballad | a song or song-like poem that tells a story. |
| Biography | an account of a person’s life written or told by another person. |
| Blank verse | poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. |
| Character | an individual in a story or play. |
| Comedy | in general, a story that ends happily. |
| Conflict | a struggle or clash between opposing characters, forces, or emotions. |
| Connotations | all the meanings, associations, or emotions that a word suggest. |
| Couplet | two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme. |
| Denotation | the literal, dictionary definition of a word. |
| Description | a kind of writing that is intended to recreate a person, place, thing or experience. |
| Dialect | a way of speaking that is characteristic of particular region or group of people. |
| Diction | a writers or speakers choice of words. |
| Drama | a story that is written to be acted out in front of an audience. |
| Epic | a long narrative poem that relates the great deeds of a larger-than-life hero who embodies the values of a particular society. |
| Essay | a short piece of nonfiction prose that examines a single subject from a limited point of view. |
| Exposition | a kind of writing that explains a subject, gives information, or clarifies an idea. |
| Epithet | an adjective or description phrase that is regularly used to characterize a person, place or thing. |
