Thursday, July 17, 2014

What are the figures of speech and each meaning?The figures of speech and their meaning and give me an example.

There are many many figures of speech and literary terms.  Most high school literature textbooks have a whole glossary in the back listing all of them.  Some of the main ones are:


Allegory -  a narrative in which abstractions (ideas) are made concrete; characters stand for principles, attitudes, etc.


Irony - a literary device which presents a conflict between appearance and reality; may be intentional or unintentional on the part of a character, but always intentional on the part of the author


Alliteration - The repetition of initial consonant sounds.


Assonance - The repetition of vowel sounds.


Idiom - a phrase where the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words,


Imagery - Words or phrases that appeal to any sense or any combination of senses.


Metaphor - A comparison between two objects with the intent of giving clearer meaning to one of them. Often forms of the "to be" verb are used, such as "is" or "was", to make the comparison.


Onomatopoeia - The use of words which imitate sound. 



Personification - A figure of speech which endows animals, ideas, or inanimate objects with human traits or abilities.


Point-of-view - The author's point-of-view concentrates on the vantage point of the speaker, or "teller", of the story or poem.


1st person: the speaker is a character in the story or poem and tells it from his/her perspective (uses "I")


3rd person limited: the speaker is not part of the story, but tells about the other characters but limits information about what one character sees and feels.


3rd person omniscient: the speaker is not part of the story, but is able to "know" and describe what all characters are thinking.


Repetition - the repeating of words, phrases, lines, or stanzas.


Simile - A comparison between two objects using a specific word or comparison such as "like", "as", or "than".

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