| A | B |
|---|
| Adhominem Argument | appealing to a person's feelings or prejudices rather than his intellect (racism). |
| Allegorical | Characters, actions, or settings represent abstract ideas or moral qualities. (Witch in Snow White represents greed/jealousy). |
| Allusion | A referense to someone or something that is known from literature, history, religion, politics, etc. |
| Analyze | To examine critically so as to bring out the essential elements or give the essence of. |
| Anaphora | the delibrate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs. |
| Anecdote | A short, entertaining account of some happening, usually personal or biographical. (playing tag with your eyes closed.) |
| Antithesis | rhetorical contrast of ideas by means of parallel arrangement of words ("they promised freedom and provided slavery"); direct opposite of an idea. |
| Apostrophe | In prose, apostrophe interrupts the discussion or discourse and addresses directly a person or personified thing, either present or absent. |
| Appositive | a noun or pronoun that follows another to identify or explain it. (George Washington, our first President, was a great military leader.) |
| A priori reasoning | derived by reasoning of self-evident propositions (general to universal premises) - deductive; opposite of a posteriori: derived by reasoning from observed facts - inductive. |
| Assonance | deliberate repetition of vowel sounds. (Only old Jones knows....) |
| Audience | The people for whom a piece of literature is written (Children, peers, etc.) |
| Cadence | a rhythmic sequence or flow of sound in language. (There once was a boy named Chris/ Who always at that and this. Limerick) |
| Chiasmus | a figure of speech by which the order of the terms in the first of two parallel clauses is reversed in the second. (Bandaid) |
| Colloquial | Of or relating to conversation, especially familiar to informal |
| Comic Devices | Something used to gain a humorous effect |
| mock-seriousness | sarcasm |
| incongruity | out of place |
| exaggeration | stretching the truth |
| absurdity | unreasonable |
| Comparison and Contrast | comparison focuses on the similarities betweent two or more subjects |
| Conceit | exaggerated comparison in literature. Far-fetched. |
| Connotation | in literary criticism a word's denotation is its primary or literal significance whereas connotation is the range of secondary significance which a word commonly suggests |
| Consonance | the repetition of similar consonant sounds in a group of words. |
| Dialect | variety of a language used by a group of speakers who are set off from others geographically or socially |
| Diction | style of speaking or writing as dependent upon choice of words, particularly for clarity, effectiveness, and precision |
| Didactic | intended to instruct; morally instructive |
| Digression | to turn aside from the main topic or subject in speaking or writing |
| Ellipsis | marks used to show the omission of a word or words (...) |
| Empathy | capacity for experiencing the feelings and thoughts of another |
| Enervation | to weaken or destroy the stength or vitality of (medicine: to remove a nerve or part of a nerve) |
| Enjambment | the running over of a sentence from one verse or couplet to another so that closely related words fall in different lines |
| Enumeration | list, to count, to give in detail one by one |
| Epiphany | an intuitive grasp of reality through something usually simple and striking |
| Equivocation | to avoid comitting oneself in what one says; to lie. |
| Erudite | learned |
| Eulogy | a speech or writing in praise of a person or thing; funeral oration |
| Euphemism | a figure of speech where a less disagreeable word or phrase is substiuted ofr a more accuate but more offensive one |
| Euphony | soothing, pleasant sounds |
| Expository | a kind of writing intended primarily to present information |
| Extended analogy | a stretched out agreement, resemblance, or correespondence between different objects |
| Figurative language | expressing one thing in terms normall denoting another with which it may be regarded as analogous |
| First person perspective | a set of linguistic forms referring to the speaker or writer of the utterance in which they occur |
| Form | the spelling, inflection, or meaningful unit in language; to put together, create, compose, or organize |
| Homily | a sermon or serious moral talk |
| Hyperbole | rhetorical overstatement or understatement |
| Hyperbolic language | rhetorical exaggeration that is not intended to be taken literally produces emphasis in serious liteerature; when applied to banal |
| Idyll | a short writing describing a simply, pleasant, peaceful scene of rural, pastoral, or domestic life. |
| Imagery | the employment of figures of speech or vivd descriptions in writing or speaking to produce mental images |
| Unductive reasoning | the process of reasoning that a general principle is true becasue the special cases you have seen are true. |
| Irony | a mode of expression in which the intended meaning of the words is the opposite of the usual sense; an outcome or even which is the opposite of what was expected. |
