| A | B |
|---|
| Sensory Details | taste, touch, smell, sight, feeling--these words give excitement and a sense of being able to "live" the experience with the writer. |
| Personal narratives allow people to | give a story of an experience in someone's life |
| Main idea | the most important point in a piece of writing |
| Plot | the series of challenges which arise in the course of a piece of fictional writing. |
| Author's purpose | the reason the author writes a particular article or essay |
| motive | why a character does what he or she does |
| three main purposes of prose writing | to inform, to entertain, to persuade |
| The number of paragraphs expected in a standard MLA writing | five |
| topic sentence | states the main idea of a PARAGRAPH |
| supporting sentences | give specific details that explain or prove the main idea |
| fact | something that can be proven |
| examples | specific instances of a general idea |
| concluding sentence | this is the last sentence, which pulls together the preceding sentences by emphasizing the main idea. |
| chronological order | when a work presents its details in the way in which they occur |
| narratives use this type of order | chronological |
| this type of writing reveals information about a subject | expository |
| sentence fragments | lack either a subject or a verb, or do not express a complete thought |
| dependent/subordinate clauses | lacks a complete thought and cannot stand by itself as a complete sentence |
| independent clause | expresses a complete thought and can stand by itself |
| simile | uses like or as to make a comparison between unlike things: Her eyes are like stars. |
| metaphor | creating a direct comparison between unlike things: Her eyes are stars. |
| symbol | an action, object or idea which has a second meaning outside of its literal one in the story |
| onomatopoeia | words that attempt to imitate the physical sound of something: "Buzz buzz" |
| first person narration | when the writer uses the "I" voice or perspective, telling the story as if the reader is the main character |
| third person narration | when the writer limits his perspective, using only third person "he, she, it , they" words when outside of dialogue |
| pronoun-antecedent agreement. | ensuring that the pronoun agrees with its corresponding antecedent in number, gender and person |
