Terms : Hide Images
| 10190035088 | Act | A major division in a play. | 0 | |
| 10190035089 | Antagonist | The character against whom the protagonist struggles or contends. | 1 | |
| 10190035090 | Aside | In drama, a few words or short passages spoken by one character to the audience while the other actors on the stage pretend their characters cannot hear the speaker's words. It is a theatrical convention that the aside is not audible to other characters on stage. | 2 | |
| 10190035091 | Character | Any representation of an individual being presented in a dramatic or narrative work through extended verbal representation. | 3 | |
| 10190035092 | Dynamic | A character who during the course of a story undergoes a permanent change in some aspect of character or outlook. | 4 | |
| 10190035093 | Flat | Built around a single idea or quality and unchanging over the course of the narrative. | 5 | |
| 10190035094 | Round | Complex in temperament and motivation; drawn with subtlety; capable of growth and change during the course of the narrative. | 6 | |
| 10190035095 | Static | A character who is the same sort of person at the end of a story as at the beginning. | 7 | |
| 10190035096 | Stock/Stereotype | A character type that appears repeatedly in a particular literary genre, one which has certain conventional attributes and attitudes. | 8 | |
| 10190035097 | Characterization | The way an author presents characters. | 9 | |
| 10190035098 | Direct or Explicit | A character is described by the author or the narrator. | 10 | |
| 10190035099 | Indirect or Implicit | A character's traits are revealed by thoughts, actions, speech/dialogue, or appearance, or reactions from other characters. | 11 | |
| 10190035100 | Climax | The moment in a play, novel, short story, or narrative poem at which the crisis reaches its point of greatest intensity and is t hereafter resolved. It is also the peak of emotional response from a reader or spectator and usually the turning point in the action. | 12 | |
| 10190035101 | Comedy | Came to mean any play or narrative poem in which the main characters manage to avert an impending disaster and have a happy ending. The comedy did not necessarily have to be funny, and indeed, many comedies are serious in tone. | 13 | |
| 10190035102 | Comic relief | A humorous scene, incident, character, or bit of dialogue occurring after some serious or tragic moment. Comic relief is deliberately designed to relieve emotional intensity and simultaneously heightens and highlight the seriousness or tragedy of the action. | 14 | |
| 10190035103 | Conflict | The opposition between two characters (such as a protagonist and an antagonist), between two large groups of people, or between the protagonist and a larger problem such as forces of nature, ideas, public mores, and so on. Conflict is the engine that drives the plot. | 15 | |
| 10190035104 | Crisis | The turning point of uncertainty and tension resulting from earlier conflict in a plot. It is the unraveling of the main dramatic complications in the play, novel, or other work of literature. Usually, the dénouement ends as quickly as the writer can arrange it - for it occurs only after all the conflicts have been resolved. | 16 | |
| 10190035105 | Denouement | Refers to the outcome or result of a complex situation or sequence of events, an aftermath or resolution that usually occurs near the final stages of the plot. It is the unraveling of the main dramatic complications in a play, novel, or other work of literature. | 17 | |
| 10190035106 | Epilogue | A conclusion added to a literary work such as a novel, play, or long poem. It is the opposite of a prologue. Often, the epilogue refers to the moral of a fable. Sometimes, it is a speech made by one of the actors at the end of a play asking for the indulgence of the critics and the audience. | 18 | |
| 10190035107 | Exposition | A setting forth of the meaning or purpose (as of a writing). Discourse or an example of it designed to convey information or explain what is difficult to understand. | 19 | |
| 10190035108 | Falling Action | That segment of the plot that comes between the climax and the conclusion; the fourth part of plot structure, in which the complications of the rising action are untangled. | 20 | |
| 10190035109 | Foil | A character that serves by contrast to highlight or emphasize opposing traits in another character. | 21 | |
| 10190035110 | Hero | A mythological or legendary figure of divine descent endowed with great strength or ability. (Leading male character). | 22 | |
| 10190035111 | Tragic Flaw | A fault or weakness in character in a tragic hero that leads to his/her downfall. | 23 | |
| 10190035112 | Tragic Hero | A human being who is not all good or all bad, but just by misfortune he/she is deprived of something very valuable to him or her; brought down by his/her tragic flaw. | 24 | |
| 10190035113 | Epic Hero | A human being with characteristics a society admires and often wished to emulate. The hero is male, attractive, and unusually strong and able. He is a trained soldier or warrior and believes in and follow the code of honor for which he is willing to sacrifice his life. He fights for a noble cause: those who cannot defend themselves, usually women and children; the preservation of a society; honor; a noble way of life. | 25 | |
| 10190035114 | Monologue | Used to refer to a character speaking aloud to himself, or narrating an account to an audience with no other character on stage. | 26 | |
| 10190035115 | Prologue | A section of any introductory material before the first chapter or the main material of a prose work, or any such material before the first stanza of a poetic work. | 27 | |
| 10190035116 | Protagonist | The main character in a work, on whom the author focuses most of the narrative attention; the good guy. | 28 | |
| 10190035117 | Rising Action | The action in a play or story that leads up to the climax. | 29 | |
| 10190035118 | Scene | A dramatic sequence that takes place within a single locale (or setting) on stage; often scenes serve as the subdivision of an act within a play. | 30 | |
| 10190035119 | Soliloquy | a monologue spoken by an actor at a point in the play when the character believes himself to be alone. The technique frequently reveals a character's innermost thoughts, including his feelings, state of mind, motives or intentions. The soliloquy often provides necessary but otherwise inaccessible information to the audience. The dramatic convention is that whatever a character says in a soliloquy to the audience must be true, or at least true in the eyes of the character speaking. | 31 | |
| 10190035120 | Atmosphere/Mood | The emotional feelings inspired by a work. Describes the dominant mood of a selection as it is created by diction, dialogue, setting, and description. | 32 | |
| 10190035121 | Detail/Sensory Detail | The use of images and descriptions that appeal to the senses in order to create a vivid, concrete image for the reader. | 33 | |
| 10190035122 | Dialogue | The lines spoken by a character or characters in a play, essay, story, or novel, especially a conversation between two characters, or a literary work that takes the form of such a characterization. | 34 | |
| 10190035123 | Diction | The choice of a particular word as opposed to others; the word choice a writer makes determines the reader's reaction to the object of description, and contributes to the author's style and tone. | 35 | |
| 10190035124 | Colloquial | A word or phrase used every day in plain and relaxed speech, but rarely found in formal writing. | 36 | |
| 10190035125 | Connotation | The extra tinge or taint of meaning each word carries beyond the minimal, strict definition found in a dictionary. | 37 | |
| 10190035126 | Denotation | The minimal, strict definition of a word as found in a dictionary, disregarding any historical or emotional connotation. | 38 | |
| 10190035127 | Dialect | The language of a particular district, class, or group of persons; it encompasses the sounds, spelling, grammar, and diction employed by a specific people as distinguished from other persons either geographically or socially. Dialect is a major technique of characterization that reveals the social or geographic status of a character. | 39 | |
| 10190035128 | Formal | Involves elaborate, technical, or polysyllabic vocabulary and careful attention to the proprieties of grammar. | 40 | |
| 10190035129 | Informal | Involves conversational or familiar language, contractions, slang, elision, and grammatical errors designed to convey a relaxed tone. | 41 | |
| 10190035130 | Jargon | Potentially confusing words or phrases used in an occupation, trade, or field of study. | 42 | |
| 10190035131 | Emphasis | The manipulation of language, sound, and sentence structure to place focus on an important point, to expand upon an idea, to help create rhythm, or to increase the feeling of unity in a work. | 43 | |
| 10190035132 | Ethos | Ethical appeals that target the audience's morals or sense of right and wrong. | 44 | |
| 10190035133 | Logos | Logical appeals that target the audience's reasoning abilities. | 45 | |
| 10190035134 | Pathos | Emotional appeals that target the audience's feelings. | 46 | |
| 10190035135 | Invective | Abusive or venomous language used to express blame or censure or bitter deep seated ill will. | 47 | |
| 10190035136 | Dramatic irony | When the reader or the audience knows something the character in the play or book does not know. | 48 | |
| 10190035137 | Situational Irony | When the opposite of what is expected to happen happens. | 49 | |
| 10190035138 | Verbal Irony | When someone says something, but means the opposite; sarcasm. | 50 | |
| 10190035139 | Pun | A play on two words similar in sound but different in meaning; example sun and son. | 51 | |
| 10190035140 | Sarcasm | A nother term for verbal irony - the act of ostensibly saying one thing while meaning another. | 52 | |
| 10190035141 | Slang | Informal diction or the use of vocabulary considered to be inconsistent with the preferred wording common among the educated or elite in a culture. | 53 | |
| 10190035142 | Sentence Variety | The use of different types of sentences and structures within sentences. | 54 | |
| 10190035143 | Tone | The means of creating a relationship or conveying an attitude. By looking carefully at the choices an author makes (in characters, incidents, setting; in the work's stylistic choices and diction, etc.), careful readers can often isolate the tone of a work and sometimes infer from it the underlying attitudes that control and color the story or poem as a whole. | 55 | |
| 10190035144 | Voice | The dominating ethos or tone of a literary work. The voice existing in literary work is not always identifiable with the actual view of the author. | 56 | |
| 10190035145 | Archetype | Universal narrative designs, character types, or images which are identifiable in a wide variety of works of literature, that are recognizable to and that evoke a response from the reader. | 57 | |
| 10190035146 | Flashback | A method of narration in which present action is temporarily interrupted so that the reader can witness a past events - usually in the form of a character's memory | 58 | |
| 10190035147 | Foreshadowing | Suggesting, hinting, indicating, or showing what will occur later in a narrative. Foreshadowing often provides hints about what will happen next. | 59 | |
| 10190035148 | Incident | The component parts within the actions of a plot. | 60 | |
| 10190035149 | Motivation | The incentives or goals that, in combination with the inherent natures of the characters, cause them to behave as they do. In poor fiction actions may be unmotivated, insufficiently motivated, or implausibly motivated. | 61 | |
| 10190035150 | Narrative Voice | The "voice" that speaks or tells a story. Some stories are written in a first-person point of view, in which the narrator's voice is that of the point-of-view character. | 62 | |
| 10190035151 | Point of View | The way a story gets told and who tells it. It is the method of narration that determines the position, or angle of vision, from which the story unfolds. Point of view governs the reader's access to the story. | 63 | |
| 10190035152 | First Person | The narrator speaks as "I" and the narrator is a character in the story who may or may not influence events within it. | 64 | |
| 10190035153 | Objective | When the narrator reports speech and action but never comments on the thoughts of other characters. | 65 | |
| 10190035154 | Omniscient | A narrator who knows everything that needs to be known about the agents and events in the story, and is free to move at will in time and place, and who has privileged access to a character's thoughts, feelings, and motives. | 66 | |
| 10190035155 | Limited | A narrator who is confined to what is experienced, thought, or felt by a single character, or at most, a limited number of characters. | 67 | |
| 10190035156 | Third Person | The narrator seems to be someone standing outside the story who refers to all the characters by name or as he, she, they, and so on. | 68 | |
| 10190035157 | Theme | A central idea or statement that unifies and controls the entire work. The theme can take the form of a brief and meaningful insight or a comprehensive vision of life; it may be a single idea such as "progress," "order and duty," "seize-the-day," or "jealousy." A theme is the author's way of communicating and sharing ideas, perceptions, and feelings with readers, and it may be directly stated in a book, or it may only be implied. | 69 | |
| 10190035158 | Allusion | A casual reference in literature to a person, place, event, or another passage of literature, often without explicit identification. Allusions can originate in mythology, biblical references, literature, historical events, or legends. authors often use allusion to establish a tone, create an implied association, contrast two objects or people, make and unusual juxtaposition of references, or bring the reader into a world of experience outside the limitations of the story itself. | 70 | |
| 10190035159 | Apostrophe | Is the act of addressing some abstraction or personification that is not physically present. An apostrophe is an example of a rhetorical trope. | 71 | |
| 10190035160 | Euphemism | A mild word or phrase which substitutes for another which would be undesirable because it is too direct, unpleasant, or offensive. | 72 | |
| 10190035161 | Hyperbole/overstatement | The trope of exaggeration or overstatement for effect. | 73 | |
| 10190035162 | Metaphor | A comparison or analogy stated in such a way as to imply that one object is another one, figuratively speaking. | 74 | |
| 10190035163 | Motif | A conspicuous recurring element, such as a type of incident, a device, a reference, or verbal formula, which appears frequently in works of literature. | 75 | |
| 10190035164 | Onomatopoeia | The use of sounds that are like the noise they represent for a rhetorical or artistic effect. | 76 | |
| 10190035165 | Personification | A trope in which abstractions. | 77 | |
| 10190035166 | Simile | An analogy or comparison implied by using an adverb such as like or as, in contrast with another metaphor which figuratively makes the comparison by stating outright that one thing is another thing. | 78 | |
| 10190035167 | Symbol | Word, place, character, or object that means something beyond what it is on a literal level. | 79 | |
| 10190035168 | Understatement | Form of meiosis using a negative statement; wildly exaggerating something for effect. | 80 | |
| 10190035169 | Argumentation | Rhetorical mode that functions by convincing or persuading an audience or by proving or refuting a point of view or issue. | 81 | |
| 10190035170 | Description | Mode of discourse that depicts images verbally in space and time and arranges those images in a logical pattern, such as spatial or by association. It is aimed at bringing something to life by telling how it looks, sounds, tastes, smells, feels, or acts. | 82 | |
| 10190035171 | Exposition | Mode of discourse that has a function to inform or to instruct or to present ideas and general truths objectively. It can incorporate any of the following organizational patterns: comparison; contrast; cause and effect; classification; division; definition. | 83 | |
| 10190035172 | Narration | The mode of discourse that tells a s tory or relates an event. It organizes the events or actions in time or relates them in space. Narration generally tells what happened, when it happened, and where it happened. | 84 | |
| 10190035173 | Genre | A type or category of literature or film marked by certain shared features or conventions. The three broadest categories of genre include poetry, drama, and fiction. | 85 | |
| 10190035174 | Novel | Fictional prose work of substantial length. The novel narrates the actions of characters who are entirely the invention of the author and who are placed in an imaginary setting. | 86 | |
| 10190035175 | Novella | A work of fiction intermediate in length and complexity between a short story and a novel. | 87 | |
| 10190035176 | Prose | Any material that is not written in a regular meter like poetry. | 88 | |
| 10190035177 | Verse | There are three general meanings for verse (1) a line of metrical writing, (2) a stanza, or (3) any composition written in meter. | 89 | |
| 10190035178 | Alliteration | The repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words. Alliteration is often used to emphasize certain words or to create a musical quality. | 90 | |
| 10190035179 | Assonance | The repetition of the same or similar vowel sounds in stressed syllables that end with different consonant sounds. | 91 | |
| 10190035180 | Blank Verse | Poetry or lines of dramatic verse written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. | 92 | |
| 10190035181 | Cacophony | Language which seems harsh, rough, and unmusical - the discordancy is the aggregate effect of difficulty in pronunciation, sense, and sound. May be inadvertent or deliberate and functional. | 93 | |
| 10190035182 | Candence | The rhythmic sequence or flow in a line or lines of poetry. | 94 | |
| 10190035183 | Consonance | The repetition of consonant sounds, typically within or at the end of nonrhyming words. | 95 | |
| 10190035184 | Couplet | Two lines of rhymed verse that work together as a unit to express an idea or make a point. | 96 | |
| 10190035185 | Dramatic Monologue | A form of dramatic poetry in which the speaker describes a crucial moment in his or her life to a silent listener - and in the process, reveals much about his or her own character. The speaker may be fictional or historical figure and is clearly distinct from the poet. | 97 | |
| 10190035186 | End-stopped Line | A line of poetry in which the end of the line occurs naturally at the end of the sentence. | 98 | |
| 10190035187 | Epic | A long, narrative poem that recounts, in formal language, the exploits of a larger-than-life hero. Epic plots typically involve supernatural events, long time periods, distant journeys, and life and death struggles between good and evil. | 99 | |
| 10190065661 | Euphony | A term applied to language which seems to the ear to be smooth, pleasant, and musical. | 100 | |
| 10190065662 | Foot | A basic unit of meter consisting of one or two stressed syllables and/or one or two unstressed syllables. | 101 | |
| 10190065663 | Free Verse | Poetry that has no fixed pattern of meter, rhyme, line length, or stanza arrangement; it generally imitates natural forms of speech. | 102 | |
| 10190065664 | Iamb | A metric unit, or foot, consisting of an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable. | 103 | |
| 10190065665 | Iambic pentameter | A specific poetic meter in which each line has five metric units, or feet, and each foot consists of an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable. | 104 | |
| 10190065666 | Imagery | The "word pictures" that writers create to help evoke an emotional response in readers. | 105 | |
| 10190065667 | Lyric | Poetry that expresses a speaker's personal thoughts and feelings. Lyric poems are usually short and musical, with an emphasis on emotion. | 106 | |
| 10190065668 | Meter | A regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that gives a line of poetry a predictable rhythm. | 107 | |
| 10190065669 | Pentameter | A line of poetry consisting of five feet. | 108 | |
| 10190065670 | Persona/Speaker | The first-person narrator of a narrative poem or novel, or the lyric speaker whose voice we listen to in a lyric poem. | 109 | |
| 10190065671 | Quatrain | A four-line poem or stanza | 110 | |
| 10190065672 | Repetition | The recurrence of sounds, words, phrases, lines, or stanzas in a speech or piece of writing. Writers use repetition to emphasize an important point, to expand upon an idea, to help create rhythm, and to increase the feeling of unity in a work. | 111 | |
| 10190065673 | Rhyme | The repetition of the same stressed vowel sounds and any succeeding sounds in two or more words. | 112 | |
| 10190065674 | End | Occurs at the end of lines. | 113 | |
| 10190065675 | Internal | Occurs within a line of poetry. | 114 | |
| 10190065676 | Scansions | The analysis of the meter of a line of verse. To scan a line of poetry means to note the stressed and unstressed syllables and to ivied the line into its feet, or rhythmical units. | 115 | |
| 10190065677 | Sonnet | A lyric poem of fourteen lines, typically written in iambic pentameter and usually following strict patterns of stanza division and rhyme. | 116 | |
| 10190065678 | English/Shakespearean Sonnet | A sonnet consisting of three quatrains, or four-line stanzas, followed by a couplet, a pair of rhyming lines. The rhyme scheme is usually abab, cdcd/efef, gg. | 117 | |
| 10190065679 | Stanza | A group of lines forming a unit in a poem; a stanza in a poem is like a paragraph in prose. | 118 | |
| 10190065680 | Stressed/Unstressed Syllables | Determined by the relative loudness in the pronunciation of one syllable compared to another. | 119 | |
| 10190065681 | Antithesis | Using opposite phrases in close conjunction. Examples might be, "I burn I freeze," or "Her character is white as sunlight, black as midnight." The best antitheses express their contrary ideas in a balanced sentence. It can be a contrast of opposites. | 120 | |
| 10190065682 | Complex Sentence | Consists of one independent clause, and one or more dependent clauses. The clauses are connected through either a subordinate conjunction or a relative pronoun. The dependent clause may be the first or second clause in the sentence. If the first clause in the sentence is dependent, a comma usually separates the two clauses. | 121 | |
| 10190065683 | Ellipsis | The ellipsis consists of three evenly spaced dots (periods) with spaces between the ellipsis and surrounding letters or other marks. | 122 | |
| 10190065684 | Juxtaposition | An image-development strategy used to place like or contrasting images side by side. | 123 | |
| 10190065685 | Parallel Structure | Parallel structure means using the same pattern of words to show that two or more ideas have the same level of importance. | 124 | |
| 10190065686 | Periodic Sentence | A sentence in which the main clause or its predicate is withheld until the end. | 125 |
