Show:
General Lit Terms
Poetry Terms
Figurative Language
Style
Syntax
100
the emotional quality of a passage or the perceived attitude of a speaker towards a thing or idea in the text.
What is tone?
100
the narrative voice of the poem.
What is speaker
100
a basic comparison of two generally unlike things that produced insight.
What is metaphor
100
ridiculing to show weakness in order to make a point, teach.
What is satirize
100
the main idea or most important point in a sentence. Its position may be varied for effect.
What is climax
200
collection of an author's choice of words based on their exact or connotative meaning
What is diction?
200
a combination of sounds that produces a harsh or discordant effect.
What is cacophony
200
an elaborate simile that compares an ordinary event or situation with a more complex idea usually extending several lines, often recognized by the use of "just as, so then."
What is epic (or Homeric) simile
200
instructive; author attempts to educate or instruct the reader.
What is didactic (one who learns of their own accord is referred to as an "autodidact")
200
the rhythm or "music" of a sentence that come through parallel elements and repetition.
What is cadence
300
what a word suggests beyond its denotative (precise or dictionary) meaning, including social or emotional connections.
What are connotations?
300
the repetition of vowel sounds: “which din dims the light.”
What is assonance
300
a figure of speech in which one thing is represented by another that is commonly (and often physically) associated with it. (Not to be confused with synecdoche)
What is metonymy synecdoche: fig. of speech in which part of something is used to represent the whole metonymy: referring to a person's handwriting as "his/her/their hand" or calling a monarch "the crown" synecdoche: referring to a boat as a "sail"
300
serious in purpose and convention (no slang, contractions; no idioms).
What is formal
300
rhetorical device where certain words, sounds, concepts, or syntactic structures are reversed or repeated in reverse order.
What is chiasmus
400
a clever little story; a short account of an interesting situation relevant to the text and used as example.
What is an anecdote?
400
the speaker addresses something or someone that cannot answer, something nonliving or inanimate.
What is apostrophe
400
an elaborate, intellectually ingenious metaphor that shows the poet's realm of knowledge; it may be brief or extended.
What is conceit (which you may also know as "extended metaphor")
400
short, to the point.
What is terse
400
what we call a sentence where the most important idea comes first and the rest of the sentence unfolds easily after that (revealing information not critical to the climax).
What is loose sentence
500
a moment of insight, spiritual or personal; a character's sudden revelation about life or his or her own circumstances.
What is epiphany?
500
represented by a two syllable foot that contains one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.
What is iambic meter
500
a short quotation or verse that precedes a poem (or any text) to set the tone, provide a setting, or give other context for the poem.
What is epigraph
500
learned, polished, scholarly.
What is erudite
500
this type of sentence construction (or even paragraph construction) contains balanced grammatical structures that provide similar rhetorical value.
What is parallel structure (parallelism)