Plot
Contextual and background information told to readers about characters, plot, setting, and situation.
Exposition
Protagonist and Antagonist
"To be" verbs.
Linking Verbs
Told by a narrator who is a character in the story and who refers to themselves in the first person.
First-Person Narration
A comparison made using like, as, or though.
Simile
The events, marked by increasing tension and conflict, that build up to a story’s climax.
Rising Action
A character who exhibits a range of emotions and who evolves over the course of the story.
Round/Dynamic/3D Character
The noun or pronoun that directly receives the action of the verb.
Direct Object
A narrator who is not one of the characters in the story.
Third-Person Narration
A figure of speech used to explain or clarify an idea by comparing it explicitly to something else.
Metaphor
The outcome of a plot’s conflicts.
Resolution
A character embodying few traits and who lacks character development.
Flat/Static/2D Character
A clause that does not make sense by itself and does not express a complete thought.
Dependent Clause
Stories told by using second-person pronouns (you/your), placing the reader as a character in the story.
Second-Person Narration
Deliberate exaggeration used for emphasis, or to produce a comic/ironic effect.
Hyperbole
A literary device which hints at future events.
Foreshadowing
A flat, stereotypical character who falls into an immediately recognizable category.
Stock Character
A word that shows the relationship between a word in the sentence and the word that is its object.
Preposition
A narrator usually only knowing the full thoughts and actions of one character.
Third-Person Limited Narration
A discrepancy between what seems fitting or expected in a story and what actually happens.
Irony (Situational)
A technique in which a narrative begins in the middle of the action.
In media res
The German word for a coming-of-age-story
Bildungsroman
A verb form that is not being used as a verb, instead acting as a noun, adjective, or adverb.
Verbal
A narrator that knows the thoughts and actions of all characters in the story.
Third-Person Omniscient Narration
A literary work that portrays abstract ideas concretely, where characters are often personifications of abstract ideas, or where real people or events are portrayed figuratively through the story.
Allegory