| A | B |
|---|
| legend | A story of extraordinary deeds that is handed down from one generation to the next., |
| essay | A short piece of nonfiction prose that examines a single subject. |
| Folk tale | A story that has no known author, and was originally passed from one generation to another by word of mouth. |
| irony | A contrast between expectation and reality. |
| resolution | denouement, conclusion |
| climax | The point of greatest emotion in the story. |
| characterization | The way a writer reveals the personality of a character. |
| biography | An account of a person's life or of part of it, written or told by another person. |
| dialogue | conversation between two or more characters |
| dialect | a way of speaking that is characteristic of a certain geographical area or a certain group of people. |
| character | A poerson or an animal in a story, a play, or another literary work |
| autobiography | A person's account of his or her own life or of part of it. |
| alliteration | The repetition of consonant sounds in words that are close together. |
| allusion | A reference to someone or something from literature, history, religion, mythology, politics, sports, etc. |
| ballad | A song or poem that tells a story. It usually tells stories of tragedy or adventure. |
| motifs | Elements such as characters, images or story lines that appear in the tales of different cultures. |
| persuasion | A kind of writing intended to convince a reader to think or act in a certain way. |
| myth | A story that explains something about the world and typically involves gods or other supernatural forces. |
| mood | The atmosphere a work creates. |
| style | The way a writer uses language. This results from diction, sentence structure, and tone. |
| tone | author's attitude. |
| static character | a character that doesn't change in the story; remains the same. |
| dynamic character | A character who changes dramatically. |
| rising action | The complications in the story. |
| pun | A play on of multiple meanings of a word or on two words that sound alike but have different meanings. "Where does the elephant put his suitcase?" |
| exposition | The beginning of a plot |
| initial incident of conflict | The narrative hook in a story - Wolf Rider, the telephone call - I just killed her. |
| flashback | The interrupts chronological plot of a story. It carries you back to the past. |
| prose | Any writing that is not poetry. |
| stanza | A group of consecutive lines in a poem that form a single unit. |
| rhyme | The repetition of accented vowel sounds and all sounds following them in words that are close together in a poem. |
| symbol | a person, place, thing, or event that has meaning in itself and stands for something beyond itself as well. |
| idioms | Figurative language that does not literally mean what it says; such as, "It's raining cats and dogs." |
