| A | B |
|---|
| alliteration | The silence surged softly... |
| allusion | It was her version of wearing a scarlet A. |
| anaphora | We shall not fail. We shall go on. We shall never surrender. |
| antithesis | sink or swim |
| apostrophe | "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem" |
| assonance | A cry of delight was hiding inside |
| consonance | "And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds" |
| hyperbole | My backpack weighs a ton. |
| verbal irony | It's easy to stop smoking. I've done it several times. |
| dramatic irony | Oedipus curses the murdered of Laius, not realizing that he himself is the murderer. |
| metaphor | Her eyes were windows to her soul. |
| onomatopoeia | hiss, buzz, bang |
| oxymoron | cold fire |
| paradox | "Much madness is divinest sense" |
| parallelism | He loved swimming, running, and playing tennis. |
| personification | The wind cried in the dark. |
| polysyndeton | We ate cotton candy and hot dogs and popcorn and snow cones and pizza. |
| pun | "Ask for me tomorrow, and I shall be a grave man." |
| simile | The warrior fought like a lion. |
| synecdoche | I want to ask for her hand in marriage. |
| metonymy | I love Shakespeare. |
| understatement | I could manage to live on a million dollar salary. |
| zeugma | He stole both her car and her heart that night. |
| antagonist | opposes protagonist |
| chiasmus | "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." |
| slang | recently coined words |
| colloquialism | y'all |
| jargon | reboot, upload, concatinate, interface |
| denotation | exact meaning of a word |
| connotation | association or quality implied by a word |
| flashback | The rain made him think back to a day when he was about 7 years old... |
| foreshadowing | She left, never noticing the ticking of the mysterious package. |
| situational irony | He was a deep-sea diver who drowned in a bathtub. |
| mood | atmosphere or emotion in a literary work |
| motivation | circumstances that prompt a character to act a certain way |
| narration | the telling of a story |
| plot | the sequence of events or actions in a story |
| point of view | the perspective from which a story is told |
| prosody | study of sound and rhythm in poetry |
| protagonist | central character |
| repetition | deliberate use of element of language more than once |
| rhetoric | the study of practical usage of language |
| rhetorical question | Are you stupid or what? |
| internal rhyme | repetition of sounds within a line of poetry |
| rhyme scheme | pattern of end rhymes in a poem |
| sarcasm | seems to be praising, but is really insulting |
| setting | time and place of a work |
| shift | change resulting from epiphany or insight |
| stichomythia | dialogue with endings and beginnings lf lines echoing, but with new meanings |
| style | writer's distinctive mode of expression |
| suspense | makes a reader uncertain about outcome |
| symbol | a flag, a heart, a cross |
| syntax | arrangement of words and grammatical order |
| theme | central message of a work (subject plus opinion) |
| tone | writer's or speaker's attitude toward a subject |
