| A | B |
|---|
| theme | central idea |
| ballad | poem/songs that tells a story |
| spiritual | religious song- African-American |
| refrain | repeated lines; also called chorus |
| legend | story about famous people; sometimes true |
| myth | story about heroes/gods |
| tall tale | widely exaggerated story |
| stanza | group of lines in a poem |
| ode | lofty lyric poem; serious theme |
| symbol | stands for itself and something else |
| narrative poem | verse that tells a story |
| simile | comparison using like or as |
| metaphor | one thing is spoken of as though it were another |
| hyperbole | exaggeration made for effect |
| elegaic | expresses a speaker's feelings of loss |
| personification | an idea, animal, or thing is described as a person |
| synecdoche | the name of part of something is used in place of the whole |
| synaesthesia | combines in a single expressions images related to two or more senses |
| sonnet | 14 line poem with prescribed rhyme scheme |
| imagist poem | poem that presents a vivid picture in words |
| consonance | repetition of a consonant sound |
| alliteration | repetition of initial consonant sounds |
| assonance | repetition of vowel sounds |
| chiasmus | the order of words is reversed |
| slant rhyme | substitution of assonance or consonance for true rhyme |
| onomatopoeia | words that sound like the things to which they refer |
| iambic | unstressed-stressed |
| trochaic | stressed-unstressed |
| anapest | unstressed-unstressed-stressed |
| dactyl | stressed-unstressed-unstressed |
| spondee | stressed-stressed |
| couplet | 2 lines |
| triplet | 3 lines |
| quatrain | 4 lines |
| quintain | 5 lines |
| sestet | 6 lines |
| heptastich | 7 lines |
| octave | 8 lines |
| static character | does not change through the course of the story |
| protagonist | central figure in a story |
| antagonist | character pitted against the central figure in a story |
| blocking | determines how actors will move on a stage |
| tragedy | drama telling about the fall of a person of high status |
| melodrama | play with exaggerated characters, scenes, etc. |
| dialogue | the speech of actors in a play |
| soliloquy | speech given by a lone actore on stage |
| aside | statement heard by the audience, but not the other characters in a play |
| anecdote | brief story |
| analysis | breaks something into its parts |
| exposition | presents facts or opinions in an organized manner |
| mode | method of treating a subject while writing |
| narration | describes events |
| biography | story of a person's life written by another |
| autobiography | story of a person's life written by that person |
| prewriting | first step in the writing process |
| drafting | second step in the writing process |
| peer/self evaluation | third step in the writing process |
| revising | fourth step in the writing process |
| proofreading | fifth step in the writing process |
| publishing/presenting | last step in the writing process |
