Metaphor - A comparison is made between two unlike quantities without the use of the words "like" or "as". Jonathan Edwards, in his sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," has this to say about the moral condition of his parishioners:
There are the black clouds of God's wrath now hanging directly over your heads, full of the dreadful storm and big with thunder...
The comparison here is between God's anger and a storm. Note that there is no use of "like" or "as", as would be the case in a simile.
Mood - The atmosphere or feeling created by a literary work, partly by a description of the objects or by the style of the descriptions. A work may contain a mood of horror, mystery, holiness, or childlike simplicity, to name a few, depending on the author's treatment of the work.
Narrative poem - Ever heard of Beowulf or The Canterbury Tales? Then you're already an expert in narrative poetry.
Narrative poems are like grandpas—which is to say, they like to tell stories. Just like their prose cousins, narrative poems have everything you'd expect from a story, like narrators, characters, and a plot.
But… they're told in verse. Beyond those conventions, though, all bets are off. Narrative poems can be short and sweet, or they can be long and complicated. They might have a specific rhythm and meter… or they might not. They're fickle beasts, those narrative poets.
Ready for some more examples of narrative poetry? Peep these, APers:
Nonfiction - A genre of writing that sticks to the facts.
But, it's not that simple because nonfiction has more branches than Bank of America: biographies, arguments, histories, newspaper articles, movie reviews—those are all examples of nonfiction.
Maybe you've heard the terms "literary nonfiction" or "creative fiction" bandied about—you know, like in the locker room or at a monster truck rally. They both refer to the same thing: nonfiction that uses techniques that are more commonly found in fiction, like similes or dialogue. Travel writing, sports writing, and memoirs are all examples of literary, or creative, nonfiction. They're relaying facts, but they're doing so with style.
Onomatopoeia - A literary device in which the sound of a word echoes the sound it represents. The words "splash," "knock," and "roar" are examples. The following lines end Dylan Thomas' "Fern Hill":
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
The word "whinnying" is onomatopoetic. "Whinny" is the sound usually selected to represent that made by a horse.
Oxymoron - A figure of speech that puts together two seemingly contradictory words or phrases that actually end up making a whole lot of sense.
Example? "The jumbo shrimp she brought to the party was terribly good." (There were two of them in that sentence. Did you catch them?)
Another favorite oxymoron? The living dead, a.k.a. ZOMBIES.
Paradox - A situation or a statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection, does not. This line from John Donne's "Holy Sonnet 14" provides an example:
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me,
The poet paradoxically asks God to knock him down so that he may stand. What he means by this is for God to destroy his present self and remake him as a holier person.
Personification - A figure of speech in which something nonhuman is given human characteristics. Consider the following lines from Carl Sandburg's "Chicago":
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the big shoulders:
Carl Sandburg's description of Chicago includes shoulders. Cities do not have shoulders; people do. Sandburg personifies the city by ascribing to it something human - shoulders. "Justice is blind" is another example.
Plot - A simple word for a simple idea. What happens in the story?Plot refers to the events, scenes, and actions that make up a narrative in a work of literature. Need I say more? Nah, I didn't think so.
Poetry - If the lines of whatever you're reading stop before the end of the paper or screen, congratulations, you're reading poetry. It's really that simple.
Poetry is everything
that's not prose,
and often means
the writer really loves
to hit return. A lot.
But alas, now you're not, because this line's going all the way to the end of your screen, baby, and then some. You know how prose do. Some folks will tell you that poetry's full of metaphors and figurative language. They're wrong. Prose can be chock full of those things, too, and don't you forget it. Plus, some poems have none of these things.
And some folks will say that some prosey pieces of writing are in fact poems (prose poems, to be exact) because of their emphasis on sound and brevity. They're not wrong. What can I say? It's complicated.
Point of view - In the wise words of Oscar Wilde, "The optimist sees the doughnut; the pessimist the hole." Perspective is everything.
And that's where point of view comes in. Point of view is the perspective of a narrator or character. A narrator can write from different points of view, mainly first person or third person. Choosing the point of view is a big deal for an author, because the perspective from which a novel is narrated has a big impact on a reader's experience. If it's in the first person, for example, we get a limited view of the events; we don't get the full picture, but we do get to know a character quite well. If we're reading from a third person's perspective, we might get a bird's eye view, but we will likely be a bit detached from the goings on.
Protagonist - The protagonist is the one we root for in the novel—the character whose life we're most concerned with or whose inner life we're given access to. A protagonist is often opposed by an antagonist of some sort, who keeps our main character in conflict until he triumphs over it. Or not.
A protagonist doesn't always wear a white hat, and he doesn't always fight a dude wearing a black one. The best protagonists are often the most complex—sometimes kind, sometimes loathsome, always engaging.
Refrain - Just like in songs, a refrain in poetry is a regularly recurring phrase or verse, especially at the end of each stanza or division of a poem or song.The most famous refrain of all time? It's gotta be the one from T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
Read it, and you will be wishing those women would shut up already.
Rhyme - Simple, right? A rhyme is just a repetition of sounds that sound, well, the same.Well, it's simple and it isn't. Strictly speaking, that definition is correct, but did you know there's also a whole bunch of different types of rhyme? Seriously, take a look:
Rhyme scheme - Rhyme schemes are patterns of end rhymes in poems and songs, and they result in pleasant music for the ears.To talk about rhyme schemes, we use capital letters. So, say you have a four-line stanza, like this one, from "The Jabberwocky".
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Toves rhymes with borogroves, and wabe rhymes with outgrabe. So the rhymes alternate every other line, making the rhyme scheme of this stanza, ABAB.
Rhythm - It's all about sound. Think of it as the beat of a piece of writing, often a poem. How does language create that beat? By creating a pattern. That pattern can be made up of any number of things—repeated phrases, a mix of stressed and unstressed syllables, periodic pauses, even rhyme. Writers use all kinds of tools to create rhythm.Sure, it's a bit hard to define. But I promise you will know it when you hear it. In the meantime, it might be helpful to remember what it's not:
Rising action - Nobody ever said that riding off into the sunset would be easy—especially when there's rising action to get in the way. In a plot, the rising action is the road to the climax. It's all the stuff that sets the stage for the biggest, most exciting moment in the book. In Ender's Game, for example, Ender's training and everything that it involves is the rising action. It all leads up to Ender's final Command School test.
(Of course, if you've read Orson Scott Card's book, you know that it's much, much more than a final exam. And if you haven't read it yet, you totally want to now, don't you?)
Round character - Novelist E.M. Forster coined this phrase to describe characters who are fully fleshed out. Unlike a flat character, a round character is written in 3D. We probably have some understanding of a round character's thoughts, feelings, and motivations, and they may also change over the course of the story. Most protagonists, though not all, are round.
There are the black clouds of God's wrath now hanging directly over your heads, full of the dreadful storm and big with thunder...
The comparison here is between God's anger and a storm. Note that there is no use of "like" or "as", as would be the case in a simile.
Mood - The atmosphere or feeling created by a literary work, partly by a description of the objects or by the style of the descriptions. A work may contain a mood of horror, mystery, holiness, or childlike simplicity, to name a few, depending on the author's treatment of the work.
Narrative poem - Ever heard of Beowulf or The Canterbury Tales? Then you're already an expert in narrative poetry.
Narrative poems are like grandpas—which is to say, they like to tell stories. Just like their prose cousins, narrative poems have everything you'd expect from a story, like narrators, characters, and a plot.
But… they're told in verse. Beyond those conventions, though, all bets are off. Narrative poems can be short and sweet, or they can be long and complicated. They might have a specific rhythm and meter… or they might not. They're fickle beasts, those narrative poets.
Ready for some more examples of narrative poetry? Peep these, APers:
- "The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser
- Paradise Lost by John Milton
- "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe
Nonfiction - A genre of writing that sticks to the facts.
But, it's not that simple because nonfiction has more branches than Bank of America: biographies, arguments, histories, newspaper articles, movie reviews—those are all examples of nonfiction.
Maybe you've heard the terms "literary nonfiction" or "creative fiction" bandied about—you know, like in the locker room or at a monster truck rally. They both refer to the same thing: nonfiction that uses techniques that are more commonly found in fiction, like similes or dialogue. Travel writing, sports writing, and memoirs are all examples of literary, or creative, nonfiction. They're relaying facts, but they're doing so with style.
Onomatopoeia - A literary device in which the sound of a word echoes the sound it represents. The words "splash," "knock," and "roar" are examples. The following lines end Dylan Thomas' "Fern Hill":
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
The word "whinnying" is onomatopoetic. "Whinny" is the sound usually selected to represent that made by a horse.
Oxymoron - A figure of speech that puts together two seemingly contradictory words or phrases that actually end up making a whole lot of sense.
Example? "The jumbo shrimp she brought to the party was terribly good." (There were two of them in that sentence. Did you catch them?)
Another favorite oxymoron? The living dead, a.k.a. ZOMBIES.
Paradox - A situation or a statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection, does not. This line from John Donne's "Holy Sonnet 14" provides an example:
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me,
The poet paradoxically asks God to knock him down so that he may stand. What he means by this is for God to destroy his present self and remake him as a holier person.
Personification - A figure of speech in which something nonhuman is given human characteristics. Consider the following lines from Carl Sandburg's "Chicago":
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the big shoulders:
Carl Sandburg's description of Chicago includes shoulders. Cities do not have shoulders; people do. Sandburg personifies the city by ascribing to it something human - shoulders. "Justice is blind" is another example.
Plot - A simple word for a simple idea. What happens in the story?Plot refers to the events, scenes, and actions that make up a narrative in a work of literature. Need I say more? Nah, I didn't think so.
Poetry - If the lines of whatever you're reading stop before the end of the paper or screen, congratulations, you're reading poetry. It's really that simple.
Poetry is everything
that's not prose,
and often means
the writer really loves
to hit return. A lot.
But alas, now you're not, because this line's going all the way to the end of your screen, baby, and then some. You know how prose do. Some folks will tell you that poetry's full of metaphors and figurative language. They're wrong. Prose can be chock full of those things, too, and don't you forget it. Plus, some poems have none of these things.
And some folks will say that some prosey pieces of writing are in fact poems (prose poems, to be exact) because of their emphasis on sound and brevity. They're not wrong. What can I say? It's complicated.
Point of view - In the wise words of Oscar Wilde, "The optimist sees the doughnut; the pessimist the hole." Perspective is everything.
And that's where point of view comes in. Point of view is the perspective of a narrator or character. A narrator can write from different points of view, mainly first person or third person. Choosing the point of view is a big deal for an author, because the perspective from which a novel is narrated has a big impact on a reader's experience. If it's in the first person, for example, we get a limited view of the events; we don't get the full picture, but we do get to know a character quite well. If we're reading from a third person's perspective, we might get a bird's eye view, but we will likely be a bit detached from the goings on.
Protagonist - The protagonist is the one we root for in the novel—the character whose life we're most concerned with or whose inner life we're given access to. A protagonist is often opposed by an antagonist of some sort, who keeps our main character in conflict until he triumphs over it. Or not.
A protagonist doesn't always wear a white hat, and he doesn't always fight a dude wearing a black one. The best protagonists are often the most complex—sometimes kind, sometimes loathsome, always engaging.
Refrain - Just like in songs, a refrain in poetry is a regularly recurring phrase or verse, especially at the end of each stanza or division of a poem or song.The most famous refrain of all time? It's gotta be the one from T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
Read it, and you will be wishing those women would shut up already.
Rhyme - Simple, right? A rhyme is just a repetition of sounds that sound, well, the same.Well, it's simple and it isn't. Strictly speaking, that definition is correct, but did you know there's also a whole bunch of different types of rhyme? Seriously, take a look:
- Internal rhyme occurs within a line of poetry.
- End rhyme occurs only at the ends of lines. Go figure.
- Perfect rhyme sounds just like what it means. A perfect rhyme rhymes perfectly, as in cat and hat.
- Slant rhyme consists of rhymes that are close, but not quite there. Think dear and door or soul and all. Also known as half rhyme, imperfect rhyme, or weak rhyme. Hey! Who you callin' weak?
- Eye rhymes look alike, but don't sound alike, like tough and bough or mint and pint.
Rhyme scheme - Rhyme schemes are patterns of end rhymes in poems and songs, and they result in pleasant music for the ears.To talk about rhyme schemes, we use capital letters. So, say you have a four-line stanza, like this one, from "The Jabberwocky".
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Toves rhymes with borogroves, and wabe rhymes with outgrabe. So the rhymes alternate every other line, making the rhyme scheme of this stanza, ABAB.
Rhythm - It's all about sound. Think of it as the beat of a piece of writing, often a poem. How does language create that beat? By creating a pattern. That pattern can be made up of any number of things—repeated phrases, a mix of stressed and unstressed syllables, periodic pauses, even rhyme. Writers use all kinds of tools to create rhythm.Sure, it's a bit hard to define. But I promise you will know it when you hear it. In the meantime, it might be helpful to remember what it's not:
- It's not meter. Meter can often be used to create rhythm, but meter refers to a formal and specific pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.
- It's not cadence. Cadence, too, is a part of rhythm, but cadence refers specifically to the moments the language speeds up or slows down.
Rising action - Nobody ever said that riding off into the sunset would be easy—especially when there's rising action to get in the way. In a plot, the rising action is the road to the climax. It's all the stuff that sets the stage for the biggest, most exciting moment in the book. In Ender's Game, for example, Ender's training and everything that it involves is the rising action. It all leads up to Ender's final Command School test.
(Of course, if you've read Orson Scott Card's book, you know that it's much, much more than a final exam. And if you haven't read it yet, you totally want to now, don't you?)
Round character - Novelist E.M. Forster coined this phrase to describe characters who are fully fleshed out. Unlike a flat character, a round character is written in 3D. We probably have some understanding of a round character's thoughts, feelings, and motivations, and they may also change over the course of the story. Most protagonists, though not all, are round.