| A | B |
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| Terms | Definitions |
| Alliteration: | The practice of beginning several consecutive or neighboring words with the same sound: e.g., “The twisting trout twinkled below.” |
| Allusion: | A reference to a mythological, literary, or historical person, place, or thing: e.g., “He met his Waterloo.” |
| Antithesis: | A direct juxtaposition of structurally parallel words, phrases, or clauses for the purpose of contrast: e.g. , “Sink or swim.” |
| Apostrophe: | A form of personification in which the absent or dead are spoken to as if present and inanimate, as if animate. These are all addressed directly: e.g., “Milton! Thou shoulds’t be living at this hour.” |
| Assonance: | The repetition of accented vowel sounds in a series of words: e.g., the words “cry” and “side” have the same vowel sound. |
| Consonance: | The repetition of a consonant sound within a series of words to produce a harmonious effect: e.g. “And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.” The “d” and the “s” sounds are described as being the consonance. |
| Characterization: | Characterization is the process by which the author reveals the personalities of the characters. Direct characterization and indirect characterization. |
| Dialect: | The language used by the people of a specific area, class, district or any other group of people. The term dialect involves the spelling, sounds, grammar and pronunciation used by a particular group of people and it distinguishes them from other people around them. Local Color could be taught alongside this. |
| Diction: | Word choice intended to convey a certain effect. Levels of diction: High/formal, neutral, low. Types of diction: Slang, colloquialisms, jargon, dialect, concrete diction, abstract diction, denotation, connotation) |
| Epiphany: | The moment in the story where a character achieves realization, awareness or a feeling of knowledge after which events are seen through the prism of this new light in the story…the “ahha!” moment. |
| Flashback: | A scene that interrupts the action of a work to show a previous event |
| Foreshadowing: | Use of hints or clues in a narrative to suggest future action |
| Hyperbole: | A Deliberate, extravagant, and often outrageous exaggeration: e.g., “The shot heard ‘round the world.” It may be used for either serious or comedic effect. |
| Imagery: | Words or phrases a writer uses to represent persons, objects, actions, feelings, and ideas descriptively by appealing to the senses. |
| Irony (3 types): | Verbal Irony occurs when a speaker or narrator says one thing while meaning the opposite. An example, “It’s easy to stop smoking, I’ve done it many times.”Situational Irony occurs when a situation turns out differently from what one would normally expect—though often the twist is oddly appropriate: e.g., a deep sea diver drowning in a bathtub. Dramatic Irony occurs when a character or speaker says or does something that has different meanings from what he or she thinks it means, though the audience and other characters understand the full implication of the speech or action: e.g., Oedipus curses the murderer or Laius, not realizing that he is himself the murderer and so is cursing himself. |
| Metaphor: | A comparison of two unlike things not using “like” or “as” |
| Mood: | The atmosphere or predominant emotion in a literary work. NOT THE SAME AS TONE. |
| Motivation: | A circumstance or set of circumstances that prompts a character to act in a certain way or that determines the outcome of a situation or work. |
| Narration: | Telling of a story in writing or speaking |
| Onomatopoeia: | (Imitative harmony) is the use of words that mimic sounds they describe: e.g., “hiss,” “buzz,” and “bang.” When onomatopoeia is used on an extended scale in a poem, it is called imitative harmony. |
| Oxymoron: | Is a form of paradox that combines a pair of opposite terms into a single unusual expression: e.g., “sweet sorrow” or “cold fire.” |
| Paradox: | Occurs when the elements of a statement contradict each other. Although the statement may appear illogical, impossible, or absurd, it turns out to have a coherent meaning that reveals a hidden truth: e.g., “ Much madness in a divinest sense.” |
| Personification: | A kind of metaphor that gives inanimate objects or abstract ideas human characteristics: e.g., “The wind cried in the dark.” |
| Plot: | Sequence of events or actions in a short story, novel, play or narrative poem |
| Point of view: | The perspective from with a narrative is told. (1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person omniscient, 3rd person limited omniscient, 3rd person objective) |
| Prosody: | The study of sound and rhythm in poetry |
| Protagonist: | Central character of a drama, novel, short story, or narrative poem. Conversely, the antagonist is the character who stands directly opposed to the protagonist. |
| Pun: | A play on words that are identical or similar in sound but have sharply diverse meanings. Puns can have serious as well as humorous uses: e.g., when Mercutio is bleeding to death in Romeo and Juliet, he says to his friends, “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” |
| Repetition: | The deliberate use of any element of language more than once—sound, word, phrase, sentence, grammatical pattern, or rhythmical pattern. |
| Rhyme: | Repetition of sounds in two or more words or phrases that appear close to each other in a poem. End rhyme occurs at the end of lines; internal rhyme, within a line. Slant Rhyme: approximate rhyme. A rhyme scheme is the pattern of end rhymes. |
| Sarcasm: | The use of verbal irony in which a person appears to be praising something but is actually insultin it: e.g., “As I fell down the stairs headfirst, I hear her say, ‘Look at that coordination.’” |
| Setting: | The time and place in which events in a short story, novel, play or narrative poem take place. |
| Shift or Turn: | Refers to a change or movement in a piece resulting from an epiphany, realization, or insight gained by the speaker, a character, or the reader. |
| Simile: | A comparison of two different things or ideas through the use of words “like” or “as.” |
| Style: | The writer’s characteristic manner of employing language |
| Suspense: | The quality of a short story, novel, play, or narrative poem that makes the reader or audience uncertain or tense about the outcome of events. |
| Symbol | Any object, person, place or action that has both a meaning in itself and that stands for something larger than itself, such as a quality, attitude, belief or value: e.g., the land turtle in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath suggests or reflects the toughness and resilience of the migrant workers. |
| Synecdoche (metonymy) | A form of a metaphor. In synecdoche, a part of something is used to signify the whole: e.g., “All hands on deck.” Also, the reverse, whereby the whole can represent a part, is synecdoche: e.g., “Canada played the US in the Olympic hockey finals.” For more examples, see the AP Guide. |
| Syntax | The arrangement of words and the order of grammatical elements in a sentence. (Sentence patterns: declarative, imperative, interrogative, exclamatory, simple, compound, complex, compound-complex, loose or cumulative, periodic, balanced, natural order, inverted order, juxtaposition, parallel structure, repetition, rhetorical question, rhetorical fragment. |
| Theme | The central message of a literary work. It is not the same as a subject, which can be expressed in a word or two: courage, survival, war, pride, etc. The theme is the idea the author wishes to convey about that subject. It is expressed as a sentence or general statement about life or human nature. For more examples, see the AP Guide. |
| Tone and details: | Tone: Writer’s or speaker’s attitude toward a subject, character, or audience, and it is conveyed through the author’s choice of words and detail. Tone can be serious, humorous, sarcastic, indignant, objective, etc. Details: The facts revealed by the author or speaker that support the attitude or tone in a piece of poetry or prose. |
| Understatement (Meiosis, litotes) | The opposite of hyperbole. It is a kind of irony that deliberately represents something as being much less than it really is: e.g., “I could probably manage to survive on a salary of two million dollars per year.” |
