3 - Literary Terms Flashcards
Pathos
A strategy in which a writer tries to generate specific emotions (such as fear, envy, anger, or pity) in an audience to dispose it to accept a claim.
TL; DR: Emotion
Logos
A strategy in which a writer uses facts, evidence, and reason to make audience members accept a claim.
TL; DR: Logic
Plain Style
A way of writing that stresses simplicity and clarity of expression.
Inversion
The reversal of the normal word order in a sentence or phrase.
Allusion
A reference to someone of something that is known from history, literature, religion, politics, sports, science, or some other branch of culture.
Couplet
Two consecutive rhyming lines of poetry.
Metaphor
A figure of speech that makes a comparison between two unlike things WITHOUT using like, as, than, or resembles.
Periodic Sentence
- Phrase upon phrase upon phrase, then subject/verb.
* A sentence that, by leaving the completion of its main clause to the end, produces an effect of suspense.
Anaphora
A figure of speech involving repetition, particularly of the same word at the beginning of several clauses.
Jeremiad
A long, mournful complaint, or lamentation; a list of woes.
Persuasion
One of the four forms of discourse, which uses reason and emotional appeals to convince a reader to think or act in a certain way.
Alliteration
A repetition of the same of similar constant sounds in words that are class together.
Meter
A pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry.
Iamb
A metrical foot in poetry that had an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.
Example: protect
Aphorism
A brief, cleverly worded statement that makes a wise observation about life.
Paradox
A statement that appears self-contradictory but reveals a kind of truth.
Symbol
A person, a place, a thing, or an event that has meaning in itself and also stands for something more than itself.
Free Verse
Poetry that does not conform to a regular meter or rhyme scheme.
Archetype
A very old imaginative pattern that appears in literature across cultures and is repeated through the ages. An archetype can be a character, a plot, an image, a theme, or a setting.
Apostrophe
A direct address to someone or something that is not present.
Parallelism
The repetition of grammatically similar words, phrases, clauses, or sentences.
Third Person Limited Point of View
Unknown narrator who focuses on one character.
Omniscient Point of View
All-knowing narrator who uses 3rd person and can zoom in on all characters.
First Person Point of View
One of the characters in the story tells the story, using first-person pronouns such as I and we.
Realism
A style of writing, developed in the nineteenth century, that attempts to depict life accurately, as it really is, without idealizing or romanticizing it.
Colloquial Language
Characteristic of or appropriate to ordinary or familiar conversation rather than formal speech or writing; informal.
Catalog
A list of things, people, or events.
Naturalism
A nineteenth-century literary movement that was an extension of realism and that claimed to portray life exactly as if it were being examined through a scientists’s microscope.
Regionalism
Literature that emphasizes a specific geographic setting and that reproduces speech, behavior, and attitudes of the people who live in that region.
Antihero
Contracts with the hero archetype, or model.
Internal Conflict
Involving opposing forces within a person’s mind.
External Conflict
Can exist between two people, between a person and force of nature or machine or a whole society.
Motivation
The reasons for a character’s behavior.
Connotation
The associations and emotional undertones that have become attached to a word or phrase, in addition to its strict dictionary definition.
Stream of Consciousness
A style of writing that portrays the inner (often chaotic) workings of a character’s mind.
Blank Verse
Poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter.
Ethos
The self-image a writer creates to define a relationship with readers. In arguments, most writers try to establish this to suggest authority and credibility.
TL; DR: Knowledge
