Literary Terms
I can list and define!!!
Figurative Language Terms: comparisons
• Metaphor – comparison of two essentially different things as if they are identical.
• The snow was a white blanket over the ground
• Simile – comparison of two essentially different things using a word of comparison.
• The people reacted like pigeons going after bread crumb to the bargains on the counter.
• Personification – a figure of speech in which an object or animal is spoken of as if
it had human feelings, thoughts, or actions.
• The clerk’s feather duster danced across the display.
Figures of Speech: Sound Devices
• Alliteration – the repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words.
• The crowd pressed closely together in the cramped corridor.
• Onomatopoeia – using of words whose sounds suggest their meanings.
• Crash, boom, buzz, whisper, howl, gurgle
• Rhyme Scheme – the pattern of ending sounds in lines (rhyming).
• To show rhyme scheme, use a different letter to label each line that ends with a new sound
• Rhythm – the musical quality produced by the repetition of stressed and unstressed syllables or
by the repetition of certain other sound patterns.
• Jack and Jill went up the hill
• To fetch a pail of water
Literary Terms I
• Idiom – an expression that means something different from the literal
meaning of the words.
• It’s raining cats and dogs.
• Analogy – a literal comparison made between two things to show how they
are alike.
• His father was very much like his grandfather.
• Imagery – use of language that appeals to the senses.
• The ruby red slippers of Dorothy Gale in Oz.
Literary Terms II
• Hyperbole – an extreme exaggeration.
• When I was young I had to walk to school ten miles uphill each way.
• Irony – a contrast between expectation and reality
• Narrative voice – the speaker of the poem, not to be confused with the poet.
• Colloquial Language – the use of vocabulary that is part of everyday speech,
often including slang
Poetry
Sound and Sense
Poetry is like music
• Reading just the lyrics is not enough. We need the sound as well.
• Good poems create their own music.
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge – “the best words in their best order.”
In Zanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree;
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
• How did he do this?
Poetry Terms I
• Repetition – the use of the same word or words more than once in a line or
group of lines.
• Refer to “Artist to Artist” by Davida Adedjouma
• Free Verse – a poem written without a set pattern of rhyme, meter, or line
length. Poets use words and images to help make free verse feel different
from regular sentences or prose.
• Stanza –a group of lines in a poem. Usually, the lines in a stanza are related
to each other in the same way the sentences of a paragraph go together.
Poetry Terms II
• Sound Effects
• rhythm (or beat) – the patterned repetition of stressed and unstressed syllables
• rhyme – the repetition of accented vowel sounds
• usually at the ends of words
• alliteration – the repetition of initial consonant sounds in words close together
• consonance -- the repetition of consonant sounds within words.
• assonance – the repetition of vowel sounds within words
• onomatopoeia – use of words whose sounds suggest their meanings
• cacophony -- use of harsh, unpleasant sounds
• euphony – use of pleasing sounds