AP Lit Terms to Know Flashcards
Reference to something outside the work, especially a well-known historical/literary event, person, or work.
Allusion
A speaker/author/character’s disposition toward/opinion of a subject.
Attitude
Items/parts that make up a larger picture/story
Details
Techniques of deploying the sound of words, especially in poetry. Some techniques include rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia. They are often used to create a pleasant/discordant sound, imitate another sound, or reflect a meaning.
Devices of Sound
Word choice. Any word that is important to the meaning and the effect of a passage. Several words with a similar effect are worth discussing in a response on this technique.
Diction
Writing that uses figures of speech such as metaphor, simile, and irony. Use of words to mean something other than their literal meaning.
Figurative Language
The images of a work, its sensory details. This term has several definitions, but the most relevant ones are visual, auditory, or tactile images evoked by words of a literary work or the images that figurative language evokes. Look especially carefully at sensory details, metaphors, and similes of the passage, and sometimes diction.
Imagery
A figure of speech in which intent and actual meaning differ, characteristically praise for blame or blame for praise; a pattern of words that turns away from a direct statement of its own obvious meaning. It implies discrepancy. Sometimes, this technique is employed simply by understating: “Men have died from time to time…”
Irony
Figurative language in which a comparison is made without using “as,” “like,” or “than.”
Metaphor
The methods involved in telling a story; the procedures used by a writer of stories or accounts. This is a general term that asks you to discuss the procedures used in the telling of a story. Some examples are: POV, time manipulation, dialogue, or interior monologue.
Narrative Techniques
The vantage point of a story in which the narrator can know, see, and report whatever they choose. The narrator is free to describe any characters’ thoughts, skip about in time/place, or speak directly to the reader.
Omniscient POV
Any of several possible vantage points from which a story is told. This may be omniscient, limited to a single character, or limited to several characters. This also encompasses using the first or third person.
POV
General phrase for linguistic devices/techniques a writer can use. This encompasses style and rhetoric and can be expanded by touching upon through diction, syntax, figurative language, and imagery.
Resources of Language
The devices used in effective/persuasive language.
Rhetorical Techniques
Writing that seeks to arouse a reader’s disapproval of something through ridicule. Generally comedy that exposes errors with an eye to correct vice and folly.
Satire
The background/physical location of a story–time and place.
Setting
A directly expressed comparison using “like,” “as,” or “than.”
Simile
Management of language for a specific effect.
Strategy/rhetorical strategy
Arrangements of materials within a work, relationship of the parts of a work to the whole, logical divisions of a work.
Structure
Mode of expression in language, the characteristic manner of an author’s expression
Style
Something that is both itself and a sign of something else
Symbol
The structure of a sentence and its arrangement of words. This includes length/brevity, and kinds of sentences (questions, exclamations, etc).
Syntax
The main thought expressed by a work
Theme
The manner in which an author expresses their attitude, the intonation of the voice that expresses meaning.
Tone
A story in which people, things, and events have another meaning
Allegory
Multiple meanings a literary work may communicating, especially 2 incompatible meanings
Ambiguity
Direct address, usually to someone/something not present.
Apostrophe
Implications of a word/phrase
connotation
Device of style/subject that is recognized due to its common nature.
Convention
Dictionary meaning of a work
Denotation
Explicitly insturctive
Didactic
Use of material unrelated to the work’s subject
Digression
A pithy saying, often using contrast. This is also a brief/pointed verse form.
Epigram
A figure of speech using indirection to avoid offensive bluntness
Euphemism
Characterized by distortions/incongruities.
Grotesque
Deliberate exaggeration/overstatement
Hyperbole
The special language of a profession/group. Pejorative association with evasion, unintelligibility to outsiders, etc.
Jargon
Not figurative–fact
Literal
Songlike, characterized by emotion, subjectivity, and imagination
Lyrical
A combination of opposites
Oxymoron
A story designed to suggest a principle, illustrate a moral, or answer a question–allegorical stories
Parable
A statement that seems to be self-contradicting but is actually true.
Paradox
A composition imitating another work’s style, often for comic effect
Parody
Figurative use of language that endows the nonhuman with human traits
Personification
Quality of some fictional narrators whose words the reader can trust.
Reliability
A question asked for effect, not for a reply
Rhetorical Question
A speech in which a character who is alone speaks their thoughts alone. The same thing as a monologue, except the person is alone.
Soliloquy
A conventional pattern, expression, character, or idea
Stereotype
A form of reasoning in which two statements are made and a conclusion is drawn from them.
Syllogism
Repetition of identical or similar consonant sounds, normally at the beginning of words
Alliteration
The theme, meaning, or position that a writer undertakes to prove/support
Thesis
Repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds
“A land laid waste with all its young men slain”
Assonance
A four-line stanza rhymed abcb with four feet in lines one and three and three feet in lines two and four.
Ballad Meter
Unrhymed iambic pentameter (used in most of Shakespeare’s plays)
Blank Verse
A metrical foot of 3 syllables, an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables
Dactyl
A line with a pause at the end, such as a period, comma, colon, semicolon, exclamation point, or question mark
End-stopped
Poetry not written in a traditional meter that is still rhythmical (Walt Whitman!)
Free Verse
Two end-stopped iambic pentameter lines rhymed aa, bb, cc with the thought usually completed in the two-line unit.
Heroic Couplet
A line with 6 feet
Hexameter
A two-syllable foot with an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable
iamb
Rhyme that occurrs within a line, rather than at the end
Internal Rhyme
Use of words whose sound suggests their meaning
Onomatopoeia
A line containing 5 feet. Most common line in English verse written before 1950.
Pentameter
A seven-line stanza of iambic pentameter rhymed ababbcc, used by Chaucer and other medieval poets
Rhyme Royal
Normally a fourteen-line iambic pentameter poem
Sonnet
Usually a repeated grouping of 3+ lines with the same meter/rhyme scheme
Stanza
A 3-line stanza rhymed aba, bcb, cdc
Terza Rima
A line of 4 feet
Tetrameter
That which goes before–especially the word, phrase, or clause to which a pronoun refers
Antecedent
A group of words containing a subject and its verb that may or may not be a complete sentence
Clause
The omission of content necessary for a complete construction that is still understandable
Ellipsis
The mood of a verb that gives an order
Imperative
To restrict/limit in meaning
Modify
A similar grammatical structure within a sentence/paragraph
Parallel Structure
A sentence is grammatically complete only at the end. A loose sentence is grammatically complete before the period. The important idea in this type of sentence is completed at the end, whereas in loose sentences the important idea is placed first
Periodic Sentence
The structure of a sentence
Syntax
