| A | B |
|---|
| Moral | The lesson drawn from a fictional or nonfictional story. It can also mean a heavily didactic story. |
| Motif | main theme or subject of a work that is elaborated on in the development of the piece; a repeated pattern or idea |
| Narration | the telling of a story in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or drama; one of the four modes of discourse |
| Negative-Positive | Sentence that begins by stating what is NOT true, then ending by stating what is true. |
| Non-Sequitur | Latin for “it does not follow.” When one statement isn’t logically connected to another |
| Objectivity | an impersonal presentation of events and characters. It is a writer’s attempt to remove himself or herself from any subjective, personal involvement in a story. Hard news journalism is frequently prized for its objectivity, although even fictional stories can be told without a writer rendering personal judgment. |
| Onomatopoeia | the use of words that sound like what they mean, such as “hiss,” “buzz,” “slam,” and “boom |
| Oversimplification | When a writer obscures or denies the complexity of the issues in an argument |
| Oxymoron | a figure of speech composed of contradictory words or phrases, such as “wise fool,” bitter-sweet,” “pretty ugly,” “jumbo shrimp,” “cold fire” |
| Pacing | the movement of a literary piece from one point or one section to another |
