AP English Language and Composition Exam: Rhetorical and Literary Terms 4

Ensure you're prepared for the AP English Language and Composition Exam by learning the words in this collection of essential vocabulary. Our lists cover the language you'll see in test questions and writing prompts, important rhetorical and literary terminology, and vocabulary related to writing and grammar.
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. adage
    a condensed but memorable saying embodying an important fact
  2. anecdote
    short account of an incident
  3. apostrophe
    an address to an absent or imaginary person
  4. apposition
    a relation between a word and a noun phrase that follows
  5. assonance
    the repetition of similar vowels in successive words
  6. asyndeton
    omission of conjunctions where they would normally be used
  7. consonance
    the repetition of sounds especially at the ends of words
  8. dramatic irony
    when the audience understands something the characters don't
  9. elegy
    a mournful poem; a lament for the dead
  10. free verse
    poetry that does not rhyme or have a regular meter
  11. iambic
    of metrical units having an unstressed/stressed pattern
  12. meter
    a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse
  13. metonymy
    substituting the name of a feature for the name of the thing
  14. motif
    a recurrent element in a literary or artistic work
  15. pentameter
    a verse line having five metrical feet
  16. pun
    a humorous play on words
  17. sonnet
    a verse form of 14 lines with a fixed rhyme scheme
  18. synecdoche
    using part of something to refer to the whole thing
  19. synesthesia
    a sensation that occurs when a different sense is stimulated
  20. zeugma
    rhetorical use of a word to govern two or more words
Created on Wed Feb 10 10:32:55 EST 2021 (updated Wed Feb 10 11:46:41 EST 2021)

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