English Vocabulary

To finish the semester, English 9 students will be doing a poster project that they will present to the class next Thursday. Students will choose from the words below to make a poster that includes the word, its meaning, an example, and a picture that help it to make sense. Students will have a rubric to check that they have included all necessary details in their final product to earn full credit.

ALLEGORY

Narrative in which characters and settings stand for abstract ideas or moral qualities. A fable that teaches a moral lesson is an allegory, as are some poems or entire novels.

ASIDE

In a play, words spoken by a character directly to the audience (or to another character) but not heard by others onstage.

CHARACTER FOIL

Character who serves as a contrast to another character (two characters who are exact opposites in personality and demeanor).

DIALOGUE

Conversations between two or more characters.

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

Word or phrase that describes one thing in terms of another and that is not meant to be understood on a literal level. Metaphors and similes are two types of figurative language, but there are other types as well.

FLASHBACK

Scene in a movie, play, short story, novel, or narrative poem that interrupts the present action of the plot to show events that happened at an earlier time.

FORESHADOWING

The use of clues to hint at events that will occur later in the plot.

IMAGERY

Language that appeals to the senses.

IRONY

Contrast or discrepancy between expectation and reality.

METAPHOR

Figure of speech that makes a comparison between two unlike things without using a connective word such as like, as, than, or resembles.

MOOD
A story’s atmosphere or the feeling it evokes.

PLOT
Series of related events that make up a story or drama.

SIMILE

Figure of speech that makes a comparison between two seemingly unlike things by using a connective words such as like, as, than, or resembles.

SOLILOQUY

Long speech in which a character who is alone onstage expresses private thoughts or feelings.

THEME

The central idea or insight about human life revealed by a work of literature.

TONE

The attitude a writer takes toward a subject, a character, or the reader. Tone can be hard to separate from mood, but generally tone can change over the course of a text, but mood describes the feeling of the overall piece.