ACCUMULATION: The listing of the things to make a point.

ACRONYM: A word formed from the initial letters in a phrase. For instance, PIN is an acronym for Personal Identification Number.

ACROSTIC: A poem in which the first or last letters of each line vertically form a word, phrase, or sentence.

ADJECTIVE: A word that describes the traits, qualities, or number of a noun E.g. big, purple, boring, obvious

ADVERB: A word that describes or gives more information about a verb, adjective, adverb, or phrase. E.g. in the phrase, “she smiled cheerfully,” the adverb is “cheerfully.”

ALLEGORY: The term loosely describes any writing in verse or prose that has a double meaning.

ALLITERATION: Repeating a consonant sound in close proximity to others, or beginning several words with the same vowel sound. For instance, the phrase "buckets of big blue berries" alliterates with the consonant b.

ALLUSION: A casual reference in literature to a person, place, event, or another passage of literature, often without explicit identification. Authors assume that the readers will recognize the original sources and relate their meaning to the new context.

AMBIGUITY: Lacking a clear meaning

ANECDOTE: A short narrative account of an amusing, unusual, revealing, or interesting event. Writers may use anecdotes to clarify abstract points, to humanise individuals, or to create a memorable image in the reader's mind.

ANTHOLOGY: The term anthologyrefers to a collection of poetry, drama, or verse.

ANTRHOPOMORPHISM: When animals are given human qualities (opposite of zoomorphism

ANTICLIMAX A drop, often sudden and unexpected, from a dignified or important idea or situation to one that is trivial or humorous. Also, a sudden descent from something sublime to something ridiculous. In fiction and drama, this refers to action that is disappointing in contrast to the previous moment of intense interest.

ANTITHESIS: Using opposite phrases in close conjunction. Examples might be, "I burn, and I freeze," or "Her character is white as sunlight, black as midnight."

ARCHETYPE: A recurring character, idea, or object e.g. the hero archetype.

ATMOSPHERE (Also called mood): The emotional feelings inspired by a work.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: A non-fictional account of a person's life--usually a celebrity, an important historical figure, or a writer--written by that actual person.

AUDITORY IMAGERY: When sounds are described in detail

BILDUNGSROMAN: The German term for a coming-of-age story.

BIOGRAPHY: A non-fictional account of a person's life--usually a celebrity, an important historical figure, or a writer.

CHARACTER: Any representation of an individual being presented in a dramatic or narrative work through extended dramatic or verbal representation. The main character of a work of a fiction is typically called the protagonist; the character against whom the protagonist struggles or contends (if there is one), is the antagonist.

CHARACTERISATION: An author or poet's use of description, dialogue, dialect, and action to create in the reader an emotional or intellectual reaction to a character or to make the character more vivid and realistic.

CLICHÉ: An overused word, phrase, or idea. Clichés are considered bad writing and bad literature.

CLIFFHANGER: A suspenseful or dramatic moment, ensuring that the audience will keep reading or watch the next film to find out what happens.

CLIMAX: The moment in a play, novel, short story, or narrative poem at which the crisis reaches its point of greatest intensity and is thereafter resolved. It is also the peak of emotional response from a reader or spectator and usually the turning point in the action.

COLLOQUIALISM: A word or phrase used every day in plain and relaxed speech, but rarely found in formal writing.

CONFLICT: The opposition between two characters, large groups of people, or between the protagonist and a larger problem such as forces of nature or ideas. Conflict may also be completely internal, such as the protagonist struggling with his psychological tendencies. Conflict is the engine that drives a plot.

CONTRAST: A comparison of two or more objects, events or characters who have different characteristics.

CYCLICAL: When a story starts and ends in similar way.

DIDACTIC: Any text that serves to instruct or teach a lesson

DIALECT: A form of language spoken by a particular group of people e.g. from a particular region or socio-economic status.

DIALOGUE: The lines spoken by a character or characters.

DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE: A poem in which a poetic speaker addresses either the reader or an internal listener at length.

EXCLAMATORY LANGAUGE: Language that conveys a strong emotion

ELLIPSIS (1) In its oldest sense as a rhetorical device, ellipsisrefers to the artful omission of a word (2) In its more modern sense, ellipsis refers to a punctuation mark indicated by three periods to indicate material missing from a quotation. . . like so.

EMOTIVE LANGUAGE: Language that appeals to the audience’s emotions****

ENJAMBEMENT: A line having no pause or end punctuation but having uninterrupted grammatical meaning continuing into the next line.

EPIGRAPH: A short quotation or saying at the beginning of a book or chapter, intended to provided context or thematic allusion.

EPILOGUE: A conclusion added to a literary work such as a novel, play, or long poem. It is the opposite of a prologue.

EUPHEMISM: Using a mild or gentle phrase instead of a blunt, embarrassing, or painful one. For instance, saying "Grandfather has gone to a better place" is a euphemism for "Grandfather has died."

FABLE: A brief story illustrating human tendencies through animal characters. Fables often include talking animals or animated objects as the principal characters.

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE: A deviation from what speakers of a language understand as the ordinary or standard use of words to achieve some special meaning or effect.

FLASHBACK: A scene or moment that occurs earlier in the plot but interrupts the main narrative.

FORESHADOWING: Suggesting, hinting, indicating, or showing what will occur later in a narrative. Foreshadowing often provides hints about what will happen next.

GENRE*:* A type or category of literature or film marked by certain shared features or conventions.

GUSTATORY IMAGERY: When tastes are described in detail

HYPERBOLE:  Exaggeration or overstatement.

IDIOLECT: the speech habits peculiar to a particular person.

IMAGERY: Includes the "mental pictures" that readers experience with a passage of literature.

INTERIOR MONOLOGUE: A type of stream of consciousness in which the author depicts the interior thoughts of a single individual in the same order these thoughts occur inside that character's head.

INTERTEXTUALITY: When a text refers to another text.

IRONY: Cicero referred to irony as "saying one thing and meaning another." Irony comes in many forms. Verbal irony (also called sarcasm) is when a speaker makes a statement in which its actual meaning differs sharply from the meaning that the words express. Dramatic irony (the most important type for literature) involves a situation in a narrative in which the reader knows something about present or future circumstances that the character does not know. Situational irony is when accidental events occur that seem oddly appropriate, such as the poetic justice of a pickpocket getting his own pocket picked.

JARGON: Potentially confusing words and phrases used in an occupation, trade, or field of study. We might speak of medical jargon, sports jargon, pedagogic jargon, police jargon, or military jargon, for instance.

JUXTAPOSITION: The arrangement of two or more ideas, characters, actions, settings, phrases, or words side-by-side or in similar narrative moments for the purpose of comparison, contrast, rhetorical effect, suspense, or character development.

LINEAR: Sequential or in chronological order

MALAPROPISM: Misusing words to create a comic effect or characterize the speaker as being too confused, ignorant, or flustered to use correct diction. Typically, the malapropism involves the confusion of two words that sound somewhat similar but have different meanings. E.g. "I was most putrified with astonishment" instead of "petrified."

MAXIM: A proverb, a short, pithy statement believed to contain wisdom or insight into human nature.

MEMOIR: An autobiographical sketch--especially one that focuses less on the author's personal life or psychological development and more on the notable people and events the author has encountered or witnessed.

METAFICTION: Fiction in which the subject of the story is the act or art of storytelling of itself, especially when such material breaks up the illusion of "reality" in a work.

METAPHOR: A comparison or analogy stated in such a way as to imply that one object is another one, figuratively speaking. When we speak of "the ladder of success," we imply that being successful is much like climbing a ladder to a higher and better position.

MODALITY: The certainty which the speaker employs in their language e.g. high modality is “It will rain today” or low modality is “It might rain today”

MONOLOGUE: An interior monologue does not necessarily represent spoken words, but rather the internal or emotional thoughts or feelings of an individual. Monologue can also be used to refer to a character speaking aloud to himself or narrating an account to an audience with no other character on stage.

MOOD: In literature, a feeling, emotional state, or disposition of mind--especially the predominating atmosphere or tone of a literary work.

MOTIF: A conspicuous recurring element, such as a type of incident, a device, a reference, or verbal formula, which appears frequently in works of literature.

NARRATION, NARRATIVE: Narration is the act of telling a sequence of events, often in chronological order. Alternatively, the term refers to any story, whether in prose or verse, involving events, characters, and what the characters say and do. A narrative is likewise the story or account itself.

NARRATOR: The "voice" that speaks or tells a story.

NON-LINEAR: Out of order e.g. use of flashbacks.

NOUN: A word that refers to the person, place, thing, event, or substance.

OLFACTORY IMAGERY: When smells are described in detail.

ONOMATOPOEIA: The use of sounds that are like the noise they represent for a rhetorical or artistic effect. For instance, buzz, click, rattle, and grunt make sounds akin to the noise they represent.

OXYMORON: Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level. E.g. jumbo shrimp, sophisticated rednecks, and military intelligence.

PALINDROME: A word, sentence, or verse that reads the same way backward or forward. Certain words in English naturally function as palindromes: for instance, civic, rotor, race car, radar, level and so on.

PARADOX (also called oxymoron): Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level. Common paradoxes seem to reveal a deeper truth through their contradictions, such as noting that "Cowards die many times before their deaths"

PARAPHRASE: A brief restatement in one's own words of all or part of a literary or critical work, as opposed to quotation, in which one reproduces all or part of a literary or critical work word-for-word, exactly.

PARODY: A parody imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work to make fun of those same features.

PATHETIC FALLACY: When weather is used to represent the mood or feelings are reflected in nature.

PATHOS: In its rhetorical sense, pathosis a writer or speaker's attempt to inspire an emotional reaction in an audience--usually a deep feeling of suffering, but sometimes joy, pride, anger, humor, patriotism, or any of a dozen other emotions.

PERSONA: A role or character adopted by the author to be their ‘voice.’

PERSONIFICATION:  Giving human characteristics to something that is not human

PLAGIARISM: Accidental or intentional intellectual theft in which a writer, poet, artist, scholar, or student steals an original idea, phrase, or section of writing from someone else and presents this material as his or her own work without indicating the source via appropriate explanation or citation.

PLOT: The structure and relationship of actions and events in a work of fiction.

POINT OF VIEW: The way a story gets told and who tells it. It is the method of narration that determines the position, or angle of vision, from which the story unfolds. Point of view governs the reader's access to the story. Many narratives appear in the first person (the narrator speaks as "I" and the narrator is a character in the story who may or may not influence events within it). Another common type of narrative is the third-person narrative (the narrator seems to be someone standing outside the story who refers to all the characters by name or as he, she, they, and so on). When the narrator reports speech and action, but never comments on the thoughts of other characters, it is the dramatic third person point of view or objective point of view. The third-person narrator can be omniscient--a narrator who knows everything that needs to be known about the agents and events in the story, and is free to move at will in time and place, and who has privileged access to a character's thoughts, feelings, and motives. The narrator can also be limited--a narrator who is confined to what is experienced, thought, or felt by a single character, or at most a limited number of characters. Finally, there is the unreliable narrator (a narrator who describes events in the story but seems to make obvious mistakes or misinterpretations that may be apparent to a careful reader). Unreliable narration often serves to characterize the narrator as someone foolish or unobservant.

POLYSYNDETON: Excessively long sentences which incorporate the repetition of ‘and’

PROLOGUE: (1) In original Greek tragedy, the prologue was either the action or a set of introductory speeches before the first entry of the chorus. (2) In later literature, a prologue is a section of any introductory material before the first chapter or the main material of a prose work, or any such material before the first stanza of a poetic work.

PRONOUN: A word that can replace the noun in a sentence e.g. he, she, they

PUN: A play on two words similar in sound but different in meaning. E.g. “Make like a tree and leave.”

SATIRE: An attack on or criticism of any stupidity or vice in the form of scathing humor, or a critique of what the author sees as dangerous religious, political, moral, or social standards.

SETTING: The general locale, historical time, and social circumstances in which the action of a fictional or dramatic work occurs.

SIBILANCE: repetition of the ‘s’ sound in a series of words

SIMILE: A comparison between two objects using the words ‘like,’ ‘as’ or ‘than’

SLANG: Informal diction or the use of vocabulary considered inconsistent with the preferred formal wording common among the educated or elite in a culture. For instance, formal wording might require a message such as this one: "Greetings. How are my people doing?" The slang version might be as follows: "Yo. Whassup with my peeps?"

SOLILOQUY: A monologue spoken by an actor at a point in the play when the character believes himself to be alone.

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS: Writing in which a character's perceptions, thoughts, and memories are presented in an apparently random form, without regard for logical sequence, chronology, or syntax. Often such writing makes no distinction between various levels of reality--such as dreams, memories, imaginative thoughts, or real sensory perception.

STYLE: The author's words and the characteristic way that writer uses language to achieve certain effects.

SUBPLOT: A minor or subordinate secondary plot which takes place simultaneously with a larger plot, usually involving the protagonist. The subplot often echoes or comments upon the direct plot either directly or obliquely.

SYMBOL: A word, place, character, or object that means something beyond what it is on a literal level. An object, a setting, or even a character can represent another more general idea.

SYMBOLISM: Frequent use of words, places, characters, or objects that mean something beyond what they are on a literal level.

TENSE: Past, present, or future. The way events are grammatically written about.

TENSION: In common usage, tensionrefers to a sense of heightened involvement, uncertainty, and interest an audience experiences as the climax of the action approaches.

THEME: A central idea or statement that unifies and controls an entire literary work.

THESIS: A thesis is an argument, either overt or implicit, that a writer develops and supports.

TONE: The means of creating a relationship or conveying an attitude or mood. By looking carefully at the choices an author makes (in characters, incidents, setting; in the work's stylistic choices and diction, etc.), careful readers often can isolate the tone of a work and sometimes infer from it the underlying attitudes that control and colour the story or poem as a whole. The tone might be formal or informal, playful, ironic, optimistic, pessimistic, or sensual.

TRUNCATED SENTENCES: Incomplete sentences used to create tension, or urgency, or reflect the way people speak naturally in conversation.

UNRELIABLE NARRATOR: An imaginary storyteller or character who describes what he witnesses accurately, but misinterprets those events because of faulty perception, personal bias, or limited understanding. Often the writer or poet creating such an unreliable narrator leaves clues so that readers will perceive the unreliability and question the interpretations offered.

VERB: A word or phrase that describes an action, condition, or experience.

WORD CHOICE: The choice of singular words can make a dramatic effect in a sentence e.g. for blunt effect, graphic or disturbing mood etc…

ZOOMORPHISM: When humans are given animal qualities (or animal imagery)