Poetry Metalanguage

Poetry Metalanguage

• Alliteration
• Allusion
• Apostrophe
• Assonance
• Caesura
• Connotation
• Consonance
• Diction
• Dissonance
• Emotive language
• Enjambment
• Figurative language
• Hyperbole
• Imagery
• Irony
• Metaphor
• Motif
• Narrative voice
• Onomatopoeia
• Oxymoron
• Paradox
• Persona
• Personification
• Refrain
• Rhetorical questions
• Rhyme
• Rhythm
• Simile
• Symbol/symbolism
• Tone

Play Metalanguage

Act / The major sections into which plays are divided. Each act includes several scenes.
Allegory / Story in which there are 2 meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic representation of the story.
Alliteration / Repeating the initial consonant sounds of words close together to achieve an effect.
Allusion / A reference to a famous figure or an event from literature, history or mythology.
Analogy / A comparison to things that are very alike.
Antagonist / A character opposite to the protagonist (main character).
Aside / A short speech that a character gives directly to the audience. Other characters remain on stage but it is understood by the audience that they cannot hear the aside.
Caricature / Exaggerated description of a person.
Context / Environment and situations surrounding the text.
Chorus / A group of actors in Greek tragedy who are not characters in the play. They speak between acts and comment on the morality of the characters’ actions and decisions.
Dialogue / Anything said by one character to another character. A play is written in dialogue.
Drama / A work intended for performance on stage by actors. Most drama is divided into the genres of tragedy or comedy.
Denouement / The unraveling of a plot.
Dramatic irony / Irony understood by the audience but not the characters in the play.
Epilogue / Closing part of a speech or play.
Epitaph / Statement carved on a tombstone that sums up a person’s life.
Eulogy / Speech at a funeral.
Euphemism / Indirect way of saying something that is unpleasant.
Fable / A short story that has a lesson in life.
Flashback / Device used by writers and film makers to return to events in the past.
Imagery / Pictures created with words.
Irony / Literal meaning is different from intended meaning.
Melodrama / Play based on exaggerated or sensational part of a story.
Metaphor / Figure of speech comparing one object with another.
Mise en scene / Stage or film setting with all the elements that form the scene.
Monologue / A part of a drama in which a single actor speaks alone.
Paradox / A statement that appears to contradict itself but has some element of truth to it for example beautiful tyrant.
Personification / A type of metaphor in which objects or animals are given human characteristics.
Plot / Sequence of events in a text and play that tells the story.
Playwright / The writer of the play.
Prologue / Introduction to a play.
Protagonist / The main character.
Repetition / Repeating words over again for effect.
Scene / Smaller sections into which the play is divided within each act.
Set / Backdrops, furniture and props on the stage used to set the scene.
Setting / Time and place in which the action occurs.
Soliloquy / A speech made by a character when alone on stage. Soliloquies let the audience know what the character is thinking and feeling.
Stage directions / Made by the Director to help create meaning and establish settings and sound effects for the audience to follow.
Symbol / Something used to represent something else.
Theme / Central idea or issue behind the text or drama.
Tragedy / Drama that tells of serious events that end with disastrous consequences.
Tragic hero / Main character who suffers a down fall due to defeat or weakness in their character.

Text Metalanguage

Allegory

Simply put, it’s a story in which the characters or incidents symbolise key ideas that are usually ethical. Allegory is usually used to describe longer versions of the ‘fable’ form.

Ambiguity

Double meaning, often used deliberately by authors.

Anti-climax

A sudden ‘descent’ in excitement or effect, sometimes deliberately used by authors.

Audience

The intended readership for this piece of writing. Is it for an adult audience? A specialist audience who would understand the technical terms? A younger audience?

Autobiography

The story of a person’s life, usually written by that same person. Sometimes you might talk of a story or novel having ‘autobiographical elements’ – pieces of personal history made into the creative work. Romulus My Father, from the 2008 text list, is autobiographical.

Character

A person in a novel, short story or play.

Characterisation

The writer’s skill in creating realistic or effective sounding characters.

Cliché

An over-used or outworn phrase that has lost its effectiveness.

Counterplot

A sub-plot which contrasts with the main plot, often used to add meaning to the main plot.

Dialogue

Conversation between characters in a novel or story.

Dramatic conventions

Departures from reality which the audience is used to accepting when watching a play.

Epigraph

A short quote or statement, usually at the start of a book or chapter.

Epilogue

A short final section of a novel or play.

Fable

A short narrative in which some moral truth is shown through a story.

Figurative language

The opposite of literal language, figurative language is the language of imagination, and it makes demands of the reader to understand the meaning.

Flash-back

A very common technique in film, but also in novels (see Nineteen Eighty-Four on the 2008 list) where the narrative returns suddenly to an earlier time in the story.

Form

The overall format of your piece of writing: short story, poem, blog entry, film script etc. Each form has a general set of expectations and conventions that have developed over time.

Genre

The ‘kind’ or ‘type’ of writing. The style within the form; 'detective fiction', 'love poetry'. Genres often have certain conventions or expectations which you can follow, or sometimes break with, to great effect. Famous genres include the detective fiction genre, the romance genre and the gothic genre.

Idiom

The natural speech of the person being represented.

Imagery

Images are pictures in words, a common feature of poetry. Similes (‘the moon was sailing across the night sky like a balloon’) and metaphors (‘the moon was a balloon sailing across the night sky’) are typical of how images are constructed.

Indirect speech

The reporting, in a story or novel, of what someone else has said.

Irony

A figure of speech in which the meaning is the opposite of what is spoken.

Jargon

Technical or difficult language specific to a profession or sub-culture.

Metaphor

A figure of speech in which a comparison is made between two things by stating one as the other. (See example in Imagery.)

Monologue

A speech by one person in a play; think of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ speech.

Montage

A dramatic effect built up by a series of short scenes or impressions, often in apparently random order where the effect is more important than the content of each scene.

Narrative

Simply put: a story. The events occur in the order they appear.

Narrative perspective

The source of the story telling, the way the story is told.

Person

The authorial perspective, first person 'I', second person 'you', or third person 'she/he/they.

Personification

Giving human qualities to non-human objects such as animals, the sea, the wind, etc.

Plot

The framework of the story and the conscious arrangement of its events.

Point of view

Is this piece of writing told from a particular perspective or from the point of a view of a character with unique views of their own?

Prologue

Literally, a ‘before speech’, a short speech or introduction before the main story begins.

Prose

The opposite of poetry, prose is direct expression without rhyme and with no regular rhythm. Almost all novels are written in prose.

Pun

A play on words where a word is used in two senses.

Purpose

Often, this might be more about multiple purposes, but revolves around what this piece is trying to do: to persuade, to inform, to record and document, or to make the reader feel something specific?

Register

The variety and scope of language related to a specific type of communication setting, such as a formal register, or in the register of educational discourse.

Rhetorical Question

A question put for effect, that requires no answer, and expects none.

Setting

Where a novel or play takes place, often a real or historical place (the play A Man for All Seasons is set in historical England) but it may be imaginative (Nineteen Eighty- Four is set in an imaginary London of the future).

Stage direction

An instruction or explanation by the playwright as to how the play should be staged, but sometimes more than this to involve a description of the intended mood or a character’s feelings. Arthur Miller uses long and detailed stage directions in The Crucible.

Style

The overall direction and voice of the piece; how the writer says things. It might be in a ‘realistic’ style, an ‘exaggerated’ style, etc.

Sub-plot

A minor or secondary story underneath the main story, very often paralleling the main story in some way.

Symbolism

The use of something simple and concrete to represent much more complex ideas or concepts. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a glass paperweight comes to symbolize something about the beauty and fragility of the past.

Tense

Is the piece set in the past, present or future? Present tense might be something like, ‘I am walking along the beach. The sun is shining.’

Tone

The sound of a voice at specific moments in the piece of writing. Of course this will change through a piece, but if you are striving for a particular or specific tone at a particular point it might be worth saying so. You will also need to comment on the tone of a piece of writing in your language analysis tasks.

Tragedy

A representation, often in plays, of a human conflict ending in defeat and suffering, often due to some weakness or flaw in the character of the main tragic ‘hero’.

Voice

The overall sound of the writing.

Narrative mode
Alternating narrative view
Ellipsis
First person view
Linear narrative
Narrator
Nonlinear narrative
Second person view
Third person limited
Third person objective
Third person omnipresent
Third person subjective
Third person view
Voice-over

Narrative tense
Past
Present
Future

Character
Antagonist
False protagonist
Major character
Minor character
Protagonist
Secondary character
Supporting character

Plot
Anti-climax
Climax
Conflict
Denouement
Dialogue
Exposition
Subplot
Trope-cliché
Turning point

Setting
Culture
Historical
Geographical
Social
Dystopia
Utopia

Shot type
Aerial shot
Bridging shot
Close-up shot
Dolly shot
Extreme long shot
Long shot
Master shot
Medium shot
Over-the-shoulder shot
Point-of-view shot
Pull back shot
Shot-reverse shot

Camera lens
Normal lens
Telephoto lens
Wide-angle lens

Camera movement
Camera rotation
Crane
Pan
Rack focus
Shaking
Tilt
Tracking
Zooming

Lighting
Artificial lighting
Backlighting
Backlighting
Fill light
Frontal lighting
High-key lighting
Key light
Lighting intensity
Low-key lighting
Natural lighting
Side lighting
Three-point lighting
Top lighting
Under-lighting

Mise-en-Scene
Blocking
Framing
Offscreen space

Sound
Dialogue
Music
Sound effects

Editing
Continuity cut
Cross-cutting
Cut
Jump cut
Match cut
Montage

Optical effects
Fade-in
Wipe
Dissolve

Focus
Iris in
Iris out
Rack focusing

Other cinematic techniques
Active voice
Adaptation
Allegory
Alliteration
Allusion
Ambivalence
Ambiguity
Antithesis
Antonyms
Bildungsroman
Characterisation
Cliffhanger
Colloquialism
Complex sentence
Compound sentence
Connotation
Context
Contextual framework
Denouement
Diachronic
Dialect
Dialogue
Elision
English (American)
English (Australian)
Enjambment
Epiphany
Euphemism
Flash back
Flash forward
Foreshadowing
Formal
Hyperbole
Idiom
Imagery
Informal
Intonation
Irony
Juxtaposition
Lamb
Metaphor
Meter
Mood
Morphemes
Motif
Neologism
Onomatopoeia
Oxymoron
Paradox
Parody
Passive voice
Pathos
Periphrasis
Personification
Pitch
Positioning
Prefix
Rhetoric
Rhythm
Simile
Simple sentence
Slang
Soliloquy
Stereotype
Symbols
Synonyms
Tautology
Tone
Tragedy
Vernacular