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| Define: theme | A unifying or dominant idea. |
| Define: plot | The storyline (the chronological sequence of a story). |
| Define: setting | The surroundings or environment of anything. |
| Define: oxymoron | Seemingly self-contradictory effect, as in “cruel kindness” or “to make haste slowly". |
| Define: pun | The humorous use of a word or phrase so as to emphasize or suggest its different meanings or applications. |
| Define: exposition | The act of expounding, setting forth, or explaining. |
| Define: rising action | A related series of incidents in a literary plot that build toward the point of greatest interest. |
| Define: falling action | The part of a literary plot that occurs after the climax has been reached and the conflict has been resolved. |
| Define: symbol | Something used for or regarded as representing something else. |
| Define: irony | The use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning: the irony of her reply, “How nice!” when I said I had to work all weekend". |
| Define: symbolism | The practice of representing things by symbols, or of investing things with a symbolic meaning or character. |
| Define: moral | Concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong; ethical: "moral attitudes". |
| Define: apostrophe | The sign ('), as used: to indicate the omission of one or more letters in a word, whether unpronounced, as in "o'er" for over, or pronounced, as in "gov't" for government. |
| Define: foil | To prevent the success of "Loyal troops foiled his attempt to overthrow the government". |
| Define: mood | A prevailing emotional tone or general attitude - "The mood of the scene was joyful." |
| Define: tone | "Tone", in written composition, is an attitude of a writer toward a subject or an audience. Tone is generally conveyed through the choice of words or the viewpoint of a writer on a particular subject. |
| Define: soliloquy | An utterance or discourse by a person who is talking to himself or herself or is disregardful of or oblivious to any hearers present (often used as a device in drama to disclose a character's innermost thoughts): Hamlet's soliloquy begins with “To be or not to be". |
| Define: foot | A "foot" is a combination of stressed and unstressed syllables. There are all kinds of "feet" in poetry, and they all sound different. |
| Define: monologue | A part of a drama or poetry in which a single actor speaks alone. |
| Define: prose | The ordinary form of spoken or written language, without metrical structure, as distinguished from poetry or verse. |
| Define: quatrain | A stanza or poem of four lines, usually with alternate rhymes. |
| Define: stanza | An arrangement of a certain number of lines, usually four or more, sometimes having a fixed length, meter, or rhyme scheme, forming a division of a poem. |
| Define: turning point | A point at which a decisive change takes place; critical point; crisis. |
| Define: verse | A succession of metrical feet written, printed, or orally composed as one line; one of the lines of a poem. (a poem, or piece of poetry) |
| Define: iamb/iambus | Noting or pertaining to satirical poetry written in "iambs (a foot of two syllables, a short followed by a long in quantitative meter, or an unstressed followed by a stressed in accentual meter, as in Come live / with me / and be / my love)". |
| Define: diction | A style of speaking or writing as dependent upon choice of words. |
| Define: pentameter | An unrhymed verse of "five" iambic feet; heroic verse. |
| Define: parody | A humorous or satirical imitation of a serious piece of literature or writing. |
| Define: elegy | A mournful, melancholy, or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song or a lament for the dead. |
| Define: blank verse | Unrhymed verse, especially the unrhymed iambic pentameter most frequently used in English dramatic, epic, and reflective verse. |
| Define: motif | A recurring subject, theme, idea, etc., especially in a literary, artistic, or musical work. |
| Define: conflict | Every storyline involves some kind of conflict. It is a struggle between two forces, but these forces can be either internal (feelings) or external (physical). |
| Define: protagonist | The leading character, hero, or heroine of a drama or other literary work. |
| Define: resolution | The act of finding an answer or solution to a conflict, problem, etc. : the act of resolving something. |
| Define: climax | "Climax" is that particular point in a narrative at which the conflict or tension hits the highest point. |
| Define: alliteration | It is a stylistic device in which a number of words, having the same first consonant sound, occur close together in a series. |
| Define: metaphor | A figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance, as in “A mighty fortress is our God.”. |
| Define: tragic hero | A great or virtuous character in a dramatic tragedy who is destined for downfall, suffering, or defeat. |
| Define: epithalamium | A poem or song written to celebrate a marriage; nuptial ode (song). |
| Define: onomatopoeia | The formation of a word, as cuckoo, meow, honk, or boom, by imitation of a sound made by or associated with something. |
| Define: point-of-view | The position of the narrator in relation to the story, as indicated by the narrator's outlook from which the events are depicted and by the attitude toward the characters. |
| Define: inciting incident | It is an event that makes the hero in a story “go into motion” and take action. |
| Define: denouement | The "denouement" is a literary device which can be defined as the resolution of the issue of a complicated plot in fiction. Majority of the examples of denouement show the resolution in the final part or chapter that is often an epilogue. |
| Define: figure of speech | Any expressive use of language, as a metaphor, simile, personification, or antithesis, in which words are used in other than their literal sense. |
| Define: rhymed couplet | A unit of verse consisting of two successive lines, usually rhyming and having the same meter and often forming a complete thought or syntactic unit. |
| Define: static character | A literary or dramatic character who undergoes little or no inner change; a character who does not grow or develop. |
| Define: rhyme scheme | The pattern of rhymes used in a poem, usually marked by letters to symbolize correspondences, as rhyme royal, ababbcc. |
| Define: personification | "Personification" is a figure of speech in which a thing, an idea or an animal is given human attributes. |
| Define: dynamic character | a literary or dramatic character who undergoes an important inner change, as a change in personality or attitude |
| Define: foreshadowing | It is to show or indicate beforehand. |
| Define: dramatic irony | irony that is inherent in speeches or a situation of a drama and is understood by the audience but not grasped by the characters in the play. |
