| A | B |
|---|
| dialect | way of speaking that is characteristic of a particular region or a particular group of people |
| dialogue | the conversation between characters in a story or play |
| diction | a writer's or speaker's choice of words |
| drama | story that is written to be acted for an audience |
| dramatic monologue | a poem in which a speaker addresses one or more silent listeners, often reflecting on a specific problem or situation |
| epic | lang story told in elevated language (usually poetry), which relates the great deeds of a larger-than-life hero who embodies tha values of a particular society |
| epithet | adjective or descriptive phrase that is regularly used to characterize a person, place, or thing |
| essay | short piece of nonfiction that examines a single subject from a limited point of view |
| exposition | type of writing that explains, gives information, defines, or clarifies an idea |
| fable | very brief story in prose or verse that teaches a moral, or a practical lesson about how to get along in life |
| figure of speech | word or phrase that describes one thing in terms of another and is not meant to be understood on a literal level |
| flashback | scene in a movie, play, short story, novel, or narrative poem that interrupts the present action of the plot to flash backward and tell what happened at an earlier time |
| flash-forward | a scene in a movie, play, short story, novel, or narrative poem that interrupts the present action of the plot to shift into the future |
| folk tale | story that has no known author and was originally passed on from one generation to another by word of mouth |
| foreshadowing | the use of clues to hint at events that will occur later in a plot |
| free verse | poetry that does not have a regular meter or rhyme scheme |
| genre | the category that a work of literature is classified under (nonfiction, fiction, poetry, drama, and myth) |
| haiku | Japanese verse form consisting of three lines and, usually, seventeen syllables (five in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third) |
| hyperbole | figure of speech that uses exaggeration to express strong emotion or to create a comic effect |
| iambic pentameter | line of poetry that contains five iambs |
| idiom | expression peculiar to a particular language that means something different from the literal meaning of each word |
