Literary Terms
The time and place in which a story occurs.
What is the setting?
A word that names a person, place, thing, or idea.
What is a noun?
The process of correcting spelling, grammar, punctuation and other technical errors in writing.
What is proofreading/editing?
A word such as "buzz," "crash" or "hiss" that imitates a sound.
What is onomatopoeia?
A brief restatement of the most important ideas in a text.
What is a summary?
The sequence of events that makes up the story.
What is the plot?
A word that expresses an action or state of being.
What is a verb?
This sentence usually identifies the main idea of a paragraph.
The pattern of end rhymes in a poem, often represented by using letters (e.g., ABAB).
What is a rhyme scheme?
The term for a "person" telling or explaining the story in a short story or novel.
What is a narrator?
This term refers to the central message(s) or important idea(s) explored by a literary work.
What is theme?
A word that replaces a noun in a sentence, such as he, she, or it.
What is a pronoun?
A sentence that states the main argument of an essay is called this.
What is the thesis?
This English adaption of a three-line Japanese poetic form, traditionally associated with a 5-7-5 syllable pattern, is known as this.
What is haiku?
The term for a personal judgement, belief or viewpoint.
What is an opinion?
The term for the main character in a story.
What is the protagonist?
The mark of punctuation used to show possession or missing letters in a contraction.
What is an apostrophe?
A type of academic misconduct (i.e., cheating) in school, where you present another's words or ideas as your own.
What is plagiarism?
This type of poetry purposely has no regular rhyme scheme or meter.
What is free verse?
Any writing that is not poetry, that has sentences, paragraphs and/or chapters is called this.
What is prose?
The literary technique of providing hints or clues about events that will happen later in the story.
What is foreshadowing?
In the sentence "The dogs bark loudly at the mailman," this word is the subject.
What is dogs?
In order for a sentence to be "complete" it must at include these two essential components.
What are a subject and a predicate?
The poetic device where human-like qualities are given to something non-human.
What is personification?
A conclusion reached by combining textual evidence with reasoning and prior knowledge.
What is an inference?