literary devices

Connotations: associations

Imagery: a particularly memorable image

Rhythm: pace of sentence

Semantic Field: a set of words in proximity grouped by their meaning

Alliteration: repeated sound at beginning of words

Allusion: a reference to a specific literary text or story

Analepsis: flashback

Anaphora: repetition of phrase at beginning of successive clauses

Anthropomorphism: giving animals human qualities

Assonance: repeated vowel sounds

Asyndeton: omission of conjunctions

Cacophony: repeated hard 'c' sounds

Caesura: a pause in a text's rhythm

Chiasmus: a phrase then repeated in reverse order

Contrast: two opposites

Colloquial Language: slang

Consonance: repeated consonant sounds

Dental Alliteration: alliteration with 'd's

Diction: the way in which someone pronounces words

Direct Speech: when a character is directly quoted

Doppelganger: somebody's double, their mirror

Double Meaning: when something can be interpreted two ways

Enjambment: run-on lines

Euphony: language that is pleasing to hear, often high sounds

Fricatives: harsh 'f and 'th' sounds

Foreshadowing: hints of what is to come in the story

Gutteral Alliteration: alliteration with 'g's

Half-Rhyme: when two words almost rhyme

Hyperbole: exaggeration

Imperatives: commands

Internal Rhyme: a rhyme within a line or sentence

Irony: an inversion

Juxtaposition: contrast next to one another

Metaphor: a figurative comparison

Onomatopoeia: when a word sounds like its meaning

Oxymoron: juxtaposition within a phrase

Paradox: a necessary contradiction

Paronomasia: pun

Pathetic Fallacy: when the natural world represents a character's internal emotions

Pathos: emotive language requiring the audience's sympathy

Personification: giving something human qualities

Plosive: an 'airy stop' like in b, d, g, k, t, and sometimes p

Polysyndeton: conjunctions used in succession

Prolepsis: flashforward

Prosopopoeia: when an inanimate object talks

Refrain: an oft-repeated phrase

Repetition: something being repeated, including structure

Rhetorical Question: a question posed for persuasive effect

Sibilance: repeated 's' sounds

Simile: a comparison with like' or 'as'

Soliloquy: when a character speaks about their feelings directly to the audience without the knowledge of other characters in a play

Symbolism: an repeating icon with an associated meaning

Syncope: the omission of a vowel in verse using' instead

Synaesthesia: a confusion of senses

Tone: vibe

Tricolon: triplet

Volta: the 'turn' in a Petrarchan Sonnet between octave and sestet