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| Syllogism | A form of reasoning in which two statements are made and a conclusion is drawn from them. A syllogism is the format of a formal argument that consists of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. Example:Major Premise: All tragedies end unhappily. |
| Symbolism | the use of symbols or anything that is meant to be taken both literally and as representative of a higher and more complex significance |
| Synecdoche | a figure of speech in which a part of something is used to represent a whole, such as using “boards” to mean a stage or “wheels” to mean a car – or “All hands on deck.” |
| Syntactic Fluency | Ability to create a variety of sentence structures, appropriately complex and/or simple and varied in length |
| Syntax | the grammatical structure of a sentence; the arrangement of words in a sentence. It includes length of sentence, kinds of sentences (questions, exclamations, declarative sentences, rhetorical questions, simple, complex, or compound). |
| Theme | the central idea or “message” of a literary work |
| Thesis | the main idea of a piece of writing. It presents the author’s assertion or claim. The effectiveness of a presentation is often based on how well the writer presents, develops, and supports this. |
| Tone | the characteristic emotion or attitude of an author toward the characters, subject, and audience (anger, sarcastic, loving, didactic, emotional, etc.) |
| Transition | a word or phrase that links one idea to the next and carries the reader from one part of a piece of writing to another. |
| Tricolon | Sentence consisting of three parts of equal importance and length, usually three independent clauses."Be sincere, be brief, be seated." |
| Understatement | the opposite of exaggeration. It is a technique for developing irony and/or humor where one writes or says less than intended. |
| Unity | quality of a piece of writing (also see coherence) |
| Voice | refers to two different areas of writing. One refers to the relationship between a sentence’s subject and verb (active and passive voice). The second refers to the total “sound” of a writer’s style. |
