The sounds of words
- Alliteration: the repetition of initial consonant sounds.
- Assonance: close repetition of similar vowel sounds, usually in stressed syllables.
- Consonance: close repetition of identical consonant sounds before and after different vowels.
- Cacophony: harsh sounds introduced for poetic effect - sometimes words that are difficult to pronounce.
- Euphony: agreeable sounds that are easy to articulate.
- Onomatopoeia: the use of words which sound like what they mean.
- Repetition: purposeful re-use of words or phrases for an effect.
- Rhyme: words that sound alike.
- Rhythm: a series of stressed or accented syllables that is repeated.
The meaning of words
- Allegory: representation of an abstract or spiritual meaning
- Allusion: a direct or indirect reference to a familiar figure, place, or event from history, literature, mythology, or the Bible.
- Ambiguity: a word or phrase that can mean more than one thing, even in its context.
- Analogy: a comparison, usually something unfamiliar with something familiar.
- Apostrophe: a figure of speech in which a person not present is addressed.
- Cliché: overused expression that has lost its intended force or novelty.
- Connotation: the social, emotional, or psychological overtones of a word apart from the word's literal meaning.
- Contrast: the comparison or juxtaposition of things that are different.
- Denotation: the dictionary meaning of words.
- Euphemism: an understatement used to lessen the effect of a statement, substituting something innocuous for something offensive or hurtful.
- Hyperbole: an exaggeration in the service or truth - an overstatement.
- Idiom: a phrase or a fixed expression that has a figurative, or sometimes literal, meaning.
- Imagery: a concrete representation of a sense, a feeling, or an idea. Evoking images of sensory experience.
- Irony:a literary device which reveals concealed or contradictory meanings.
- Metaphor: a comparison between unlike things without the use of comparison words such as like or as.
- Metonymy: figure of speech in which a closely related term is substituted for an object or idea.
- Oxymoron: two words placed close together which are contradictory, yet have truth in them.
- Paradox: statement in which there is an apparent contradiction which is actually true.
- Personification: giving human attributes to an animal, object, or idea.
- Pun: word play in which words with different meanings have similar or identical sounds
- Simile: comparison between unlike things using like, as, or as though.
- Symbol: an object or action that means more than itself, that stands for something beyond itself.
Arranging the words
- Point of view (voice): the creating and artistic intelligence that we recognize behind any speaker.
- Verse: a single line of a poem arranged in a metrical pattern.
- Stanza: division of a poem created by arranging the lines into a unit (a "paragraph" within a poem).
- Meter: any regular pattern of rhythm based on stressed and unstressed syllables.
- Rhyme scheme:the pattern established by the arrangement of rhymes in a stanza or poem.
- Forms: arrangements or methods used to convey the content. The "way it is said."
- Open: free from regularity and consistency in elements such as rhyme, line length, and metrical form.
- Closed: subject to a fixed structure and pattern.
- Blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter
- Free verse: poetry without a regular pattern of meter or rhyme.
- Couplet: a pair of lines, usually rhymed. The shortest stanza.
- Quatrain: a four-line stanza, or a grouping of four lines in a verse.
- Fixed form:
- Ballad: narrative poem written in four-line stanzas, characterized by swift action and narrated in a direct style.
- Epitaph: brief poem or statement in memory of someone who is deceased.
- Limerick: light an humorous form of five verses of which lines 1, 2, and 5 are of three feet and lines 3 and 4 are of two feet.
- Haiku: Japanese form of poetry consisting of three unrhymed lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables.
- Ode: long, stately poem in stanzas of varied length, meter, and form. Usually serious poem on an exalted topic.
- Sonnet: Fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter.
- Triolet: poem or stanza of eight lines in which the first line is repeated as the fourth and seventh lines and the second line as the eighth.