Literary Terms for Exam

Alliteration: repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words that are close to one another: Mickey Mouse; Donald Duck

Allusion: a reference to a well-known person, place, or thing from literature, history, etc. Example: Eden

Anaphora: Repetition of a word, phrase, or clause at the beginning of two or more sentences in a row. This is a deliberate form of repetition and helps make the writer’s point more coherent. (Example:“There was the delight I caught in seeing long straight rows. There was the faint, cool kiss of
sensuality. There was the vague sense of the infinite….”)

Anecdote: a short, simple narrative of an incident; often used for humorous effect or to make a point.

Apostrophe: usually in poetry but sometimes in prose; the device of calling out to an imaginary, dead, or absent person or to a place, thing, or personified abstraction

Diction: word choice, an element of style; Diction creates tone, attitude, and style, as well as meaning. Different types and arrangements of words have significant effects on meaning. An essay written in academic diction would be much less colorful, but perhaps more precise than street slang.

Epigraph: the use of a quotation at the beginning of a work that hints at its theme. Hemingway begins The Sun Also Rises with two epigraphs. One of them is “You are all a lost generation” by Gertrude Stein.

Hyperbole: deliberate exaggeration in order to create humor or emphasis (Example: He was so hungry he could have eaten a horse.)

Invective: a verbally abusive attack

Irony: a situation or statement in which the actual outcome or meaning is opposite to what was expected.

Metaphor: a figure of speech in which one thing is referred to as another; for example, “my love is a fragile flower”

Metonymy: a figure of speech that uses the name of an object, person, or idea to represent something with which it is associated, such as using “the crown” to refer to a monarch ; Also, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”

Onomatopoeia: the use of words that sound like what they mean, such as “hiss,” “buzz,” “slam,” and “boom”

Oxymoron: a figure of speech composed of contradictory words or phrases, such as “wise fool,” bitter-sweet,” “pretty ugly,” “jumbo shrimp,” “cold fire”

Parable: a short tale that teaches a moral; similar to but shorter than an allegory

Paradox: a statement that seems to contradict itself but that turns out to have a rational meaning, as in this quotation from Henry David Thoreau; “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

Pathos: the aspects of a literary work that elicit sorrow or pity from the audience. An appeal to emotion that can be used as a means to persuade. Over-emotionalism can be the result of an excess of pathos.

Personification: the attribution of human qualities to a nonhuman or an inanimate object

Polysyndeton: Sentence which uses and or another conjunction (with no commas) to separate the items in a series. Polysyndeton appear in the form of X and Y and Z, stressing equally each member of a series. It makes the sentence slower and the items more emphatic than in the asyndeton.

Simile: a figure of speech that uses like, as, or as if to make a direct comparison between two essentially different objects, actions, or qualities; for example, “The sky looked like an artist’s canvas.”

Synecdoche: a figure of speech in which a part of something is used to represent a whole, such as using “boards” to mean a stage or “wheels” to mean a car – or “All hands on deck.”

Syntax: the grammatical structure of a sentence; the arrangement of words in a sentence. Syntax includes length of sentence, kinds of sentences (questions, exclamations, declarative sentences, rhetorical
questions, simple, complex, or compound).

Understatement: the opposite of exaggeration. It is a technique for developing irony and/or humor where one writes or says less than intended.