key words

• a natural pause or break in a line of poetry

  caesura
• A 'doing' word; a word expressing action. 'Walk', 'talk', 'come', 'go', 'eat' and 'sleep'. Writers understand the importance of choosing these words carefully to create clear moods and images

  verb choice
• Repetition of initial consonant sounds

  alliteration
• the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line, couplet, or stanza.

  enjambment
• the state of having contradictory or conflicting emotional attitudes

  ambivalence
• monosyllabic


  having only one syllable per word
• A group of words with associated meanings and uses.

  Lexical field
• The multiple meanings, either intentional or unintentional, of a word, phrase, sentence, or passage.

  Ambiguity
• A word that imitates the sound it represents.

  Onomatopoeia
• I, me, my, mine

  first person singular
• a line of poetry with 10 syllables. The even number syllables are stressed. Iambic meter is closest to normal human speech; therefore, it is often used for serious poems.

  Imabic pentameter
• the shift or point of dramatic change in a poem

  volta
• the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses

  Anaphora
• a group of lines in a poem

  Stanza
• A line or set of lines repeated several times over the course of a poem.

  refrain
• we, us, our, ours

  first person plural
• An indirect, less offensive way of saying something that is considered unpleasant

  Euphemism
• informal words or expressions not usually acceptable in formal writing

  Colloquialism
• A word inside a line rhymes with another word on the same line

  internal rhyme
• Where the adverbial occurs at the beginning of the sentence

  fronted adverbial
• A contrast between expectation and reality

  irony
• A condition in which different elements are equal or in the correct proportions. There are three types of visual balance: symmetry, asymmetry, and radial.

  Balance
• Archaism

  The use of deliberately old-fashioned language.
• 14 lines, iambic pentameter, some kind of rhyme pattern

  sonnet form
• contains eight syllables and four iambic feet

  iambic tetrameter
• verse in which certain letters such as the first in each line form a word or message

  Acrostic
• phrasing that feels informal and similar to natural speech

  conversational tone
• language used in conversation with friends; slang

  casual language
• a recurrence, renewal, or resumption of an action

  reprise
• Those who share values or common points of reference with the author

  internal audience
• greeting

  salutation
• an artist's expression of emotion in an imaginative and beautiful way; the quality of being lyrical.

  lyricism
• insincere or overly sentimental quality of writing/speech intended to evoke pity

  Bathos
• inverted order of words in a sentence (variation of the subject-verb-object order)

  inversion
• lasting a very short time

  ephemeral
• Stressed - unstressed -Stressed - unstressed

  trochaic tetrameter
• Unpleasant or unharmonious sound

  dissonace
• expressing an action that occurred before another action

  pluperfect tense