Allegory: A narrative in which characters, behavior, and even the setting demonstrates multiple levels of meaning and significance. Often a universal symbol or a personified abstraction.

Alliteration: The sequential repetition of a similar initial sound, usually applied to consonants, usually in closely proximate stressed syllables.

Allusion: A literacy, historical, religious, or mythological reference in a literacy work.

Anaphora: The regular repetition of the same words or phrases at the beginning of successive phrases or clauses.

Antithesis: The juxtaposition of sharply constrasting ideas in balanced or parallel words, phrases, grammatical structure or ideas.

Aphorism: A concise statement designed to make a point or illustrate a commonly held belief.

Appeals to… authority, emotion, logic: Rhetorical arguments in which the speaker claims to be an authority or expert in a field, or attempts to play upon the emotions, or appeals to the use of reason.

Apostrophe: An address or invocation to something inanimate.

Assonance: The repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds, usually in successive or proximate words.

Asyndeton: A sytanctical structure in which conjuctions are omitted in a series, usually producing more rapid prose.

Attitude: The sense expressed by the tone of voice or the mood of a piece of writing; the author’s feelings toward his or her subject, characters, events, or theme. It might even be his or her feelings for the reader.

Begging the question: An argumentative ploy where the arguer sidesteps the question or the conflict, evades or ignores the real question.

Canon: That which has been accepted as authentic.

Chiasmus: A figure of speech and generally a syntactical structure wherein the order of terms in the first half of a parallel clause is reversed in the second.

Colloquial: A term identifying the diction of the common, ordinary folks, especially in a specific region or area.

Conceit: A comparison of two unlikely things that is drawn out within a piece of literature, in particular an extended metaphor within a poem

Connotation: The implied, suggested, or underlying meaning of a word or phrase

Consonance: The repetition of two or more constonants with a change in intervening vowels

Critique: An assessment or analysis of something, such as a passage of writing, for determining what it is, what its limitations are, and how it conforms to the standard of the genre

Deductive reasoning: The method of argument in which specific statements and conclusions are drawn from general principles: movement from the general to the specific

Dialect: The language and speech idiosyncrasies of a specific area, region, or group

Diction: The specific word choice an author uses to persuade or convey tone, purpose or effect

Didactic: Writing or speech that has an instructive purpose or a lesson; often associated with a dry, pompous presentation

Elegy: A poem or prose that laments, or mediates upon the death of a person

Epistrophe: In rhetoric, the repetition of a phrase at the end of successive sentences

Epitaph: Writing in praise of a dread person, most often inscribed upon a headstone

Ethos: In rhetoric, the appeal of a text to the credibility and character of the speaker, writer, or narrator

Eulogy: A speech or written passage in praise of a person; an oration in honor of a deceased person

Euphemism: An indirect, kinder, or less harsh or hurtful way of expressing unpleasant information

Exposition: The interpretation or analysis of a text. Also, the opening section of a narrative or dramatic structure in which characters, setting, theme, and conflict can be revealed.