English terms

Ominous

(adj) giving the impression that something bad or unpleasant is going to happen; threatening.

Analysis

(n) the act of breaking something into parts to discover meaning.

Antecedent

(n) the word, phrase, or clause referred to by a pronoun.

Colloquialism

(n) a word or phrase that is not formal or literary, typically used in ordinary conversation.

Deduce

(v) to assume, infer, or conclude by logical inference.

Allusion

(n) brief reference in one piece of art to another piece of art.

Posit

(v) put forward as a basis of argument, suggest.

Dialect

(n) a particular form of a language that is peculiar to a specific region or social group.

Ellipsis

(n) the omission of a word or words that are superfluous or understood from contextual clues (replaced by . . .).

Genre

(n) a category of artistic composition, as in music or literature.

Exultant

(adj) triumphantly happy.

Jargon

(n) special words or expressions that are used by a particular profession or group and are difficult for others to understand.

Juxtaposition

(n) placing things side by side for the purposes of comparison to make a point.

Parallelism

(n) sentence construction which places equal grammatical constructions near each other, or repeats identical grammatical patterns to add emphasis, organization, or pacing.

Parenthetical idea

(n) an idea set off from the rest of the sentence, functioning as an aside or whisper, used sparingly for effect.

Plagiarism

(n) the act of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.

Active voice

(n) sentence structure where the subject of the sentence performs the action; a more direct and preferred style of writing.

Passive voice

(n) sentence structure where the subject of the sentence receives the action.

Fallacy

(n) an attractive but unreliable piece of reasoning.

Scathing

(adj) witheringly scornful; severely critical.