Unit 3: Part 3 Literary Terms

A diary is an account of a person's experiences and reactions kept daily or at frequent intervals.

A policy statement is an official statement in which a government, a business, or another organization states principles or guidelines to follow.

Point of view is the perspective from which a narrator tells a story.

Stories told from the first-person point of view have these qualities...

Satire is writing that uses humor to expose and ridicule vice and folly.

In both his novel and his essay, Swift uses the satirical weapon of irony, a surprising contradiction between reality and appearance or between the actual and intended meaning of words.

Used in poetry, prose, drama, and other basic genres, parody is writing that makes fun of another, more serious work or of its author's style.

Pope applies these conventions of classical epics to his trivial subject, the theft of a lady's lock of hair:
• epic similes, or intricate comparisons in the style of Homer that sometimes use the words like, as, or so

Also note how, in both poems, he uses antithesis, a rhetorical device in which contrasting words, clauses, sentences, or ideas are placed side by side in parallel grammatical structures: Whether he thinks too little, or too much. (Essay, line 12)

A dictionary defines words and may provide information about their pronunciation, history, and usage.

A biography is an account of someone's life written by another person.

This eighteenth-century intellectual movement stressed the following values:
• elevated diction, or word choice, revealing a respect for learning

Context clues are words and phrases in a text that help you figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar word.

Analogies show the relationships between pairs of words.

A synonym is a word that has the same meaning as another word.

Cognates are words that share a common origin but may have different meanings.

Try writing your own essay about a time of change.