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
