Literary Tool Box
Story Elements
 Antagonist vs. Protagonist: The protagonist is the main character in a story or literary
work. The antagonist is the person or force which opposes the main character.
 Characterization: The development of characters into real and believable entities.
o Direct: The author/narrator tells you about a character.
o Indirect: You, the reader, must infer information about the character based on
actions, discussions, characteristics, etc.
o Dynamic vs. Static: Dynamic characters change over the course of the story,
while static characters stay the same from beginning to end.
o Round vs. Flat: Round characters are fully developed, multi-dimensional
characters. They are oven the protagonist or other main characters. In contrast,
flat characters are relative one-sided, less developed, characters. They are often
minor characters in the piece of work.
 Climax: That segment of the plot which describes the highest point of interest in a
story. The moment the conflicts have been building up to.
 Conflict/Complication: The struggle between opposing forces. Could be person vs.
person, person vs. nature, person vs. society, person vs. circumstances, and person vs.
self.
o Internal: Any conflict that is going on within a character. The only one that fits
here is person vs. self.
o External: Any conflict with a character and someone or something outside of
them. This includes person vs. person, person vs. nature, person vs. society, and
person vs. circumstances,
 Denouement (day-new-mah): That segment of the plot which describes the unraveling
of the plot; theme is usually revealed here. This usually comes after the climax, as the
story starts to move toward a resolution.
 Exposition: The segment of the plot which describes the setting and introduces the
characters. This is the first part of a story.
 Foil: A character who is used as a contrast to another character. The foil emphasizes
the differences between two characters.
 Initial Incident (narrative hook): This is the part of the plot that begins the conflict.
The thing that gets the story going.
 Plot: Series of events or incidents which develop the story line. Everything that
happens.
 Point-of-View: Who the author has telling the story.
o First Person: A character is telling the story using “I” or “me”
o Third Person: A narrator is telling the story.
 Omniscient: Narrator is all-knowing and can see in the hearts and minds
of all characters.
 Limited Omniscient: Narrator tells the story from one perspective.
 Setting: When (time) and where (place) the story takes place.
Poetic Terms
 Blank Verse: Poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. (See below for iambic
pentameter).
 Couplet: Two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme.
 Enjambment: This is also called a run-on line. The use of run-on lines to complete a
thought from one line of thought to the next. The lines do not conclude a thought with
punctuation.
 Iambic Pentameter: A line of poetry made up of five iambs (metrical foot). It consists
of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.
 Lyric Poetry: Poetry that focuses on expressing private emotions or thoughts.
 Meter: A generally regular patter of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry. It is
measured in ‘feet’ (one foot consists of one stressed syllable and one or more
unstressed syllables.).
 Narrative Poetry: Poetry that tells a story (i.e. an epic poem).
 Rhyme: The repetition of accented vowel sounds and all sounds following them that
are close together in a poem.
o Example: shark and lark, follow and hollow
 Sonnet: A fourteen-line lyric poem, usually written in iambic pentameter, which has
one of several traditional rhyme schemes.
 Stanza: A group of lines in a poem that forms a single unit.
Literary Devices
 Alliteration: Repetition of initial consonant sounds in neighboring words.
Example: Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers
 Allusion: A reference to a person, place, thing, or event, with which the reader is
expected to be familiar.
 Assonance: Repetition of vowel sounds.
o Example: “Alone, alone, all alone. The bright night revealed the horror.”
 Figurative Language: Language that is not intended to be interpreted in a literal sense.
Figurative language always makes use of a comparison between different things. By
appealing to the imagination, figurative language provides new ways of looking at the
world. (Example: similes, metaphors, hyperbole, etc.)
 Foreshadowing: The technique of placing hints or clues of future action or events in a
story, poem, or movie.
 Hyperbole: An exaggeration or overstatement
o Example: I’m frozen stiff
 Imagery: The creations of word pictures through sense impressions—visual, auditory,
tactile, olfactory, and taste.
 Irony: A result different from the expected. The contrast between the way things are
expected to be and the way they actually are.
o Example: Medieval people believed that bathing would harm them when in fact
not bathing led to the unsanitary conditions that caused the bubonic plague
 Verbal Irony: A character says the opposite of what he or she
means.
 Dramatic Irony: Situation where a character is unaware of
something the audience knows
 Metaphor: A direct comparison of two things.
o Example: The pen is mightier than the sword.
“All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players” –
Shakespeare
 Extended Metaphor: A metaphor that is developed over several lines of
writing or even through a paragraph or entire poem.
 Onomatopoeia: Words that sound like their meanings; words that give sound effects,
such as "buzz," "hiss," "plop," "pow," etc.
 Personification: Giving human qualities to things non-human.
o Example: The waves strangled the victim
 Simile: A comparison of two things using “like” or “as”
o Example: The sun is like a disk of gold
 Symbolism: When a concrete object (touchable/real) stands for a more abstract idea,
something beyond itself.
o Example: A red rose represents love
Drama
 Aside: Private words that a character in a play speaks to another character or to the
audience that are not supposed to be overheard by others onstage.
 Monologue: A long, formal speech made by a character in a play.
 Soliloquy: A long speech in which a character who is usually alone on the stage
expresses his or her private thoughts or feelings.
 Tragedy: A play, novel, or other narrative depicting serious and important events, in
which the main character comes to an unhappy end.
Miscellaneous
 Allegory: A description—usually narrative—in which persons, places, and things all
stand for something else, creating a second level of meaning.
 Ambiguity: The expression of an idea in language that suggest more than one
meaning.
 Anachronism: Something out of its place in time.
o Example: A story that takes place in the old west has a cowboy using a cell
phone. The cell phone would be the anachronism because it’s out of it’s time
period.
 Analogy: A comparison of tow things to show that they are alike in certain respects.
 Connotation: All the positive or negative emotions a word can arouse in a reader.
 Denotation: Literal or dictionary definition of a word.
 Dialect: A way of speaking that is characteristic of a particular region or group of
people.
 Diction: A writer’s or speaker’s choice of words.
 Mood: The feeling literature arouses in a reader: happy, sad, peaceful, etc.
 Motif: A recurring symbol or idea.
 Optimism: Viewing life with an emphasis on the positive or “good” aspects.
 Oxymoron: A figure of speech that combines apparently contradictory or opposing
ideas.
o Examples: “living death,” “deafening silence,” “jumbo shrimp”
 Paradox: An apparent contradiction that is actually true.
o Example: She killed him with kindness
 Parallelism: The repetition of words, phrases, or sentences that have the same
grammatical structure or that compare and contrast ideas.
 Pessimism: Viewing life with an emphasis on the negative or “bad” aspects.
 Theme: The central idea of insight of a work of literature. It is not the same as the
subject; it is the idea the writer wishes to convey about the subject—the writer’s view
of the world or revelation about human nature.
o Moral: A lesson about life that a story teaches
o Main Idea: The central idea of the story, what the story is mainly about, the gist.
 Tone: the attitude of the speaker or author of a work toward the subject matter.
o Example: Optimistic or Pessimistic
 Universality: That quality that appeals to all people, of all places, of all times