| A | B |
|---|
| absolute | a word free from limitations or qualifications (best, all, unique) |
| adage | a familiar proverb or wise saying |
| ah hominem argument | an arguement attacking an inividual's character rather than his position on an issue |
| allegory | a literary work in which characters, objects, or actions represent abstractions |
| alliteration | the repetition of initial sounds in successive or neighboring words |
| allusion | a reference to something literary, mythological, or historical that the author assumes the reader will recognize |
| analogy | a comparison of two different things that are similar in some way |
| anaphora | the repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of consecutive lines or sentences |
| anecdote | a brief narratie that focuses on a particular incident or event |
| antecedent | the word, phrase, or clause to which a pronoun refers |
| antithesis | a statement in which two opposing ideas are balanced |
| aphorism | a concise statement that expresses succinctly a general truth or idea, often using rhyme or balance |
| apostrophe | a figure of speech in which one directly addresses an absent or imaginary person, or some abstraction |
| archetype | a detail, image, or character type that occurs frequently in literature and myth and is thought to appeal in a universal way to the unconscious and to evoke a response |
| argument | a sttement of the meaning or main point of a literary work |
| asyndeton | a construction in which elements are presented in a series without conjunctions |
| balanced sentence | a sentence consisting of two parallel parts in which the second part is structurally reversed |
| cliche | an expression that has been overused to the extent that its freshness was worn off |
