The GED Reasoning Through Language Arts Test: Essential Literary Terms

On the GED Reasoning Through Language Arts Test, you will encounter passages from literature. Ensure you're prepared to analyze literary texts by mastering these important terms.
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. alliteration
    use of the same consonant at the beginning of each word
  2. allusion
    passing reference or indirect mention
  3. analogy
    drawing a comparison in order to show a similarity
  4. character
    an imaginary person represented in a work of fiction
  5. conflict
    opposition in a work of fiction between characters or forces
  6. dialogue
    the lines spoken by characters in drama or fiction
  7. exaggeration
    making to seem more important than it really is
  8. flashback
    a transition in a story to an earlier event or scene
  9. foreshadowing
    the act of providing vague advance indications
  10. genre
    a kind of literary or artistic work
  11. hyperbole
    extravagant exaggeration
  12. irony
    incongruity between what is expected and what occurs
  13. metaphor
    a figure of speech that suggests a non-literal similarity
  14. mood
    a characteristic state of feeling
  15. narrative
    an account that tells the particulars of an act or event
  16. narrator
    someone who tells a story
  17. parallelism
    repetition of similar or equivalent syntactic constructions
  18. personification
    representing an abstract quality or idea as a human
  19. plot
    the story that is told, as in a novel, play, movie, etc.
  20. repetition
    the continued use of the same word or word pattern
  21. setting
    the context and environment in which something is situated
  22. simile
    a figure of speech expressing a resemblance between things
  23. symbolism
    the practice of investing things with arbitrary meaning
  24. tone
    a quality that reveals the attitudes of the author
  25. understatement
    something said in a restrained way for ironic contrast
Created on Thu Mar 25 10:26:09 EDT 2021 (updated Tue Mar 30 14:34:16 EDT 2021)

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