english

Simile

Comparison using like or as.

Metaphor

Comparison between two objects.

Analogy

Comparison between two things to

make a concept easier to understand

or put something in a different

perspective

Personification

Giving human-like qualities to an

inanimate object.

Pun

A play on two words similar in sound but different in meaning

Euphemism

A mild word or phrase substituted for

a more offensive, unpleasant, or

crude one

Malapropism

Misusing words to create a comic

effect or characterize the speaker as

being too confused, ignorant, or

flustered to use correct diction

Aphorism

A pithy observation that contains a

general truth

Metonymy

A thing or concept called not by its

own name but rather by the name of

something that is associated with that

thing in meaning or concept

Synecdoche

When a part of an object represents

the whole, or the whole of an object

representing a part.

Apostrophe

To address someone who is not there

or to address a personified object.

Allusion

Indirect reference to a well-known

person, place, book, or event.

Ellipsis

Omission of a word or short phrase

easily understood in context.

Foreshadowing

When the author gives a hint on

future event

Synesthesia

A rhetorical trope involving shifts in

imagery. I involves taking one type of

sensory input (sight, sound, smell

touch, taste) and commingling it with

another separate sense in an

impossible way. In the resulting figure of

speech, we end up talking about

how a color sounds, or how a smell looks.

Rhetorical Question

A question that is not intended to be answered

Hyperbole

Exaggerated statement or claim not

meant to be taken literally.

Understatement

Presenting something as smaller,

worse, or less important than it really is

Parallelism

Figure or speech in which two or mort

elements of a sentence (or series of

sentences) have the same

grammatical structure

Anaphora

Repetition of a word or phrase at the

beginning of the sentence

Epistrophe

The repetition of a word at the end of

two or more sentences.

Juxtaposition

Placement of two things closely

together to emphasize similarities or differences

Antithesis

Figure of speech that juxtaposes two

contrasting or opposing ideas, usually

within parallel grammatical structures

Oxymoron

Two seemingly contradictory words

are placed together because their

unlikely combination reveals a deeper truth

Paradox

Using contradiction in a manner that

oddly makes sense on a deeper level.

Common paradoxes seem to reveal a

deeper truth through their contradictions

Anadiplosis

A literary term for the repetition of the

last word in one line of clause, to

begin the next.

Epanalepsis

Figure of speech defined by the

repetition of the initial word or words of a clause

or sentence, at the end of the same clause

or sentence

Alliteration

Repetition of consonant sounds

and/or letters in a word of phrase.

Asyndeton

The omissions of conjunctions in a series of items or clauses

Polysyndeton

Process of using conjunctions

frequently in a sentence and/or

placed very close to each other.

Antimetabole

A verbal expression in which the

second half of the sentence has the

same words as the first, but the words

are flipped to create a reverse statement

Chiasmus

A rhetorical inversion of the second of

two parallel structures - Words do NOT repeat.

Balanced Sentence

A sentence where phrases or clauses.

balance each other by their structure

meaning or length.

Cumulative Sentence

Sentence where an independent

clause is followed by a series of

dependent clauses.

Periodic Sentence

Sentence that leaves the main clause

out until the end of the sentence

Ethos

Refers to the trustworthiness or

credibility of the writer or speaker to

appeal to the audience

Pathos

Persuades by appealing to a person's

emotions and evokes emotion from the

audience in order to appeal

Logos

Writer uses facts, statistics, and