The Regents ELA Exam: Structure and Language in Prose (Glossary of Terms)

- abstract In contrast to the concrete, abstract language expresses general ideas and concepts apart from specific examples or instances. Very formal writing is characterized by abstract expression. As a noun, abstract denotes a brief summary of the key ideas in a scientific, legal, or scholarly piece of writing.

- analogy An expression of the similarities between things that are not wholly alike or related.

- anecdote A very brief, usually vivid story or episode. Often humorous, anecdotes offer examples of typical behavior or illustrate the personality of a character. Writers of biography and autobiography make extensive use of anecdote to reveal the lives of their subjects.

- antithesis In formal argument, a statement that opposes or contrasts a thesis statement. Informally, we use the term to refer to any expression or point of view completely opposed to another. In literature, even an experience or a feeling may be expressed as the antithesis of another. (See also thesis.)

- argument In persuasive writing or speaking, the development of reasons to support the writer’s position; it is the method of reasoning used to persuade. Informally, we may use the term to describe the development of a topic in any piece of expository writing. Historically, it has also denoted a summary of a literary work’s plot or main ideas.

- atmosphere Closely related to tone or mood, it refers to a pervasive feeling in a work. Atmosphere often stems from setting and from distinctive characters or actions. The atmosphere in many of Poe’s stories is mysterious, troubling, even sinister. Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” reflects the threatening and morally ambiguous world of its Puritan setting.

- autobiography A formally composed account of a person’s life, written by that person. Although we must trust, or be skeptical of, the reliability of the account, we often appreciate the firsthand narration of experience. Autobiography is also a rich source of information and insight into a historical period or into literary or artistic worlds. Autobiography, like the novel, has narrative and chronology. (See also journal, memoir.) We describe literary works that are closely based on the author’s life as autobiographical. Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie are plays that reflect many details of their authors’ lives.

- biography A narrative, historical account of the life, character, and significance of its subject. Contemporary biography is usually researched in detail and may not always be admiring of its subject. A critical biography of a literary figure includes discussion of the writer’s works to show the writer’s artistic development and career. Biographies of figures significant in history or public affairs also offer commentary on periods and events of historical importance.

- character The imagined persons, created figures, who inhabit the worlds of fiction and drama. E. M. Forster distinguished between flat and round characters. Flat are those, like stereotypes, who represent a single and exaggerated human characteristic. Round are those whose aspects are complex and convincing, and who change or develop in the course of a work. In good fiction, plot must develop out of character. It is the desires, values, and motives of characters that account for the action and conflict in a plot.

- characterization The method by which an author establishes character; the means by which personality, manner, and appearance are created. It is achieved directly through description and dialogue and indirectly through observations and reactions of other characters.

- concrete The particular, the specific, in expression and imagery. That which is concrete can be perceived by the senses. Concrete also refers to that which is tangible, real, or actual, in contrast to abstract, which is intangible and conceptual.

- conflict In the most general sense, it identifies the forces that give rise to a plot. This term may identify an actual struggle between characters, for anything from revenge to simple recognition or understanding. A plot may focus on conflict between characters and the forces of nature or society. These are essentially external conflicts. A work may also center on internal conflicts: characters’ struggles to know or change themselves and their lives. Most works of fiction and drama contain more than one aspect of conflict. (See Plot and Conflict, page 45.)

- denouement A French term meaning “untying a knot,” it refers to the way the complications or conflict of a plot are finally resolved. It also refers to what is called the “falling action” in a drama: that part of the play that follows the dramatic climax and reveals the consequences of the main action for minor characters; it also accounts briefly for what happens in the world of the play after the principal drama is resolved. In Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, the “Requiem” may be considered a denouement: it accounts for the response to Willy’s death of his wife, sons, and only friend. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the climax is in the scene following the death of Lady Macbeth in which Macbeth understands that he has destroyed all capacity for feeling and has rendered his life meaningless; the denouement occurs in the battle scene in which Macbeth comprehends the treachery of the witches and is killed by Macduff, thus restoring the throne to the rightful heir, Malcolm.

- determinism The philosophical view that human existence is determined by forces over which humans have little or no control. The concept that fate predestines the course of a character’s life or a tragic figure’s downfall is a form of determinism.

- episode A series of actions or incidents that make up a self-contained part of a larger narrative. Some novels are structured so that each chapter is a significant episode. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn are good examples. A scene in a play is often analogous to an episode in a narrative. Many television series are presented in weekly episodes.

- essay Denotes an extended composition, usually expository, devoted to a single topic. Essays may be composed to persuade, to reflect on philosophical questions, to analyze a subject, to express an opinion, or to entertain. As a literary form, the essay dates from the sixteenth century and remains a popular and widely practiced form. The origin of the term is the French word essai, which means an attempt, a trying out of something. (See formal/informal essay.)

- exposition Writing whose purpose is to inform, illustrate, and explain. In literature, exposition refers to those passages or speeches in which setting, offstage or prior action, or a character’s background is revealed. In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway pauses in the narrative to give the reader additional information about Gatsby’s background. The prologue to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is an example of exposition.

- flashback A presentation of incidents or episodes that occurred prior to the beginning of a narrative itself. When an author or filmmaker uses flashback, the “present” or forward motion of the plot is suspended. Flashback may be introduced through the device of a character’s memory, or through the narrative voice itself. William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” and Light in August include vivid passages of memory and narrative flashback. Jack Burden’s recounting of the Cass Mastern story in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men is also a form of flashback.

- foreshadowing Establishing details or mood in a work that will become more significant as the plot progresses. Thoughtful readers usually sense such details and accumulate them in their memories. In one of the opening scenes of Ethan Frome, Ethan and Mattie talk about the dangers of sledding down Starkfield’s steepest hill. In the second paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s well-known story “The Lottery,” the boys stuff their pockets with stones and make piles of them on the edge of the square.

- form The organization, shape, and structure of a work. Concretely, form may refer to genre (see below); for example, the sonnet form, the tragic form. More abstractly, form also refers to the way we sense inherent structure and shape.

- formal/informal essay In contrast to the formal essay, which emphasizes organization, logic, and explication of ideas, the informal essay emphasizes the voice and perspective of the writer. In the informal essay, also called a personal essay, the reader is aware of the author’s persona and is asked to share the author’s interest in the subject. Examples of a personal essay might be included in Part 1 Reading Comprehension, among the texts in Part 2 Argument, or in the Part 3 Text Analysis.

- genre A type or form of literature. Examples include novel, short story, epic poem, essay, sonnet, and tragedy.

- image Although suggesting something that is visualized, an image is an expression or recreation through language of any experience perceived directly through the senses.

- irony In general, a tone or figure of speech in which there is a discrepancy—a striking difference or contradiction—between what is expressed and what is meant or expected. Irony achieves its powerful effect indirectly: in satire, for example, to ridicule or criticize. We also speak of dramatic irony when the narrator or reader understands more than the characters do.

- journal A diary or notebook of personal observations. Many writers use journals to compose personal reflection and to collect ideas for their works. The journals of many writers have been published. Students are often urged to keep journals as a way to reflect on their reading, compose personal pieces, and practice writing free of concern for evaluation.

- melodrama A plot in which incidents are sensational and designed to provoke immediate emotional responses. In melodrama, the “good” characters are pure and innocent and victims of the “bad” ones, who are thoroughly evil. The term refers to a particular kind of drama popular in the late nineteenth century and, later, in silent films and early Westerns. A work becomes melodramatic when it relies on improbable incidents and unconvincing characters for strong emotional effect.

- memoir A form of autobiographical writing that reflects on the significant events the writer has observed and on the interesting and important personalities the writer has known. The Regents ELA Exam often includes examples of memoir among the texts for comprehension or analysis.

- monologue In a play, an extended expression or speech by a single speaker that is uninterrupted by response from other characters. A monologue is addressed to a particular person or persons, who may or may not actually hear it. In Ring Lardner’s short story “Haircut,” a barber tells (narrates) the story to a customer (the reader) who is present but does not respond. 

- motivation The desires, values, needs, or impulses that move characters to act as they do. In good fiction, the reader understands, appreciates, and is convinced that a character’s motivation accounts for the significant incidents and the outcome of a plot.

- narrative point of view The standpoint, perspective, and degree of understanding from which a work of narrative fiction is told. (See omniscient point of view, objective point of view.)

- narrator The character or author’s persona that tells a story. It is through the perspective and understanding of the narrator that the reader experiences the work. In some works, the narrator may inhabit the world of the story or be a character in it. In other works, the narrator is a detached but knowledgeable observer.

- naturalism Closely related to determinism, naturalism depicts characters who are driven not by personal will or moral principles but by natural forces that they do not fully understand or control. In contrast to other views of human experience, the naturalistic view makes no moral judgments on the lives of the characters. Their lives, often bleak or defeating, simply are as they are, determined by social, environmental, instinctive, and hereditary forces. Naturalism was in part a reaction by writers against the nineteenth-century Romantic view of man as master of his own fate. It is important to note, however, that none of the Naturalistic writers in America (Crane, Dreiser, London, Anderson, and Norris chief among them) presented a genuinely deterministic vision. Several of these authors began their careers in journalism and were drawn to the Naturalistic view of life as a result of their own experience and observation of life in America. (See also realism.)

- objective point of view In fiction or nonfiction, this voice presents a story or information without expressed judgment or qualification. A fundamental principle of journalism is that news reports should be objective. Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Killers” is an example of fiction rendered in a completely detached, objective point of view.

- omniscient point of view Spoken in third person (she, he, they), this is the broadest narrative perspective. The omniscient narrator speaks from outside the story and sees and knows everything about the characters and incidents. Omniscient narration is not limited by time or place. In limited omniscient point of view, the author may choose to reveal the story through full understanding of only one character and limit the action to those incidents in which this character is present.

- persona A term from the Greek meaning “mask,” it refers in literature to a narrative voice created by an author and through which the author speaks. A narrative persona usually has a perceptible, even distinctive, personality that contributes to our understanding of the story. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the omniscient narrator has a distinctive persona whose attitudes toward Puritan society and the characters’ lives are revealed throughout the novel.

- plot The incidents and experiences of characters selected and arranged by the author to create a meaningful story. A good plot is convincing in terms of what happens and why.

- poetic justice The concept that life’s rewards and punishments should be perfectly appropriate and distributed in just proportions. In Ring Lardner’s short story “Haircut,” Jim Kendall’s ironic fate is an example of poetic justice: he is a victim of one of his own crude and insensitive practical jokes. The short story “They Grind Exceeding Small,” by Ben Ames Williams, is also a vivid example of what is meant by poetic justice.

- point of view In nonfiction, this denotes the attitudes or opinions of the writer. In narrative fiction, it refers to how and by whom a story is told: the perspective of the narrator and the narrator’s relationship to the story. Point of view may be omniscient, where the narrator knows everything about the characters and their lives; or, it may be limited to the understanding of a particular character or speaker. Point of view may also be described as objective or subjective. Third-person narrative refers to characters as “he, she, they;” First-person narrative is from the “I” point of view. J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn are told in the first person. Second person, the “you” form, is rare but is found in sermons addressed to a congregation or in essays of opinion addressed directly to a leader or public figure: “You, Mr. Mayor (Madame President), should do the following . . .” Political columnists occasionally write pieces in the second-person voice for the Op-Ed pages of newspapers.

- prologue An introductory statement of the dramatic situation of a play. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet begins with a brief prologue. The first two pages of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby are a prologue to the story Nick Carraway will tell.

- prose Most of what we write is prose, the expression in sentences and phrases that reflect the natural rhythms of speech. Prose is organized by paragraphs and is characterized by variety in sentence length and rhythm.

- protagonist A term from ancient Greek drama, it refers to the central character, the hero or heroine, in a literary work.

- realism The literary period in America following the Civil War is usually called the Age of Realism. Realism depicts the directly observable in everyday life. Realistic writers seek to present characters and situations as they would appear to a careful observer, not as they are imagined or created by the author. After 1865, American writers became increasingly interested in the sources of power and force, and in the means to survival and success, in an increasingly materialistic society. For writers of this period, realism was a literary mode to express a naturalistic philosophy. (See also naturalism, verisimilitude.)

- rhetoric From Ancient Greece, the art of persuasion in speech or writing achieved through logical thought and skillful use of language.

- rhetorical question A question posed in the course of an argument to provoke thought or to introduce a line of reasoning.

- romance A novel or tale that includes elements of the supernatural, heroic adventure, or romantic passion. Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is a romance, not because it is a love story but because it goes beyond verisimilitude in dramatizing elements of demonic and mystical forces in the characters and their lives.

- satire A form or style that uses elements of irony, ridicule, exaggeration, understatement, sarcasm, humor, or absurdity to criticize human behavior or a society. All satire is ironic (see irony) in that meaning or theme is conveyed in the discrepancy between what is said and what is meant, between what is and what should be, and between what appears and what truly is. Although satire is often entertaining, its purpose is serious and meant to provoke thought or judgment. The verses of Alexander Pope and many poems by e. e. cummings are satiric. In prose, much of the writing of Mark Twain is satire; Huckleberry Finn is the most striking example. Other American writers of satire include Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton, Aldous Huxley, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Tom Wolfe. Popular television programs such as The Daily Show, South Park, and The Simpsons are also good examples of satire.

- short story This form is distinguished from most novels not simply by length but by its focus on few characters and a central, revealing incident. In stories, however, there is as much variety in narrative point of view, subject, and technique as there is in novels. Edgar Allan Poe characterized the short story as “a short prose narrative, requiring from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal.”

- soliloquy A form of monologue in which a character expresses thoughts and feelings aloud but does not address them to anyone else or intend other characters in the work to hear them. In essence, the audience for a play is secretly listening in on a character’s innermost thoughts. Macbeth’s reflection on “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow . . .” is the best-known soliloquy in the play.

- speaker The narrative voice in a literary work (see persona). Also, the character who speaks in a dramatic monologue.

- symbol Most generally, anything that stands for or suggests something else. Language itself is symbolic: sounds and abstract written forms may be arranged to stand for virtually any human thought or experience. In literature, symbols are not Easter eggs, or mushrooms—they are not “hidden meanings.” Symbols are real objects and concrete images that lead us to think about what is suggested. They organize a wide variety of ideas into single acts of understanding. They embody not single “meanings” but suggest whole areas of meaning.

- theme Roughly analogous to thesis in an essay, this is an observation about human experience or an idea central to a work of literature. The subject of a work is in the specific setting, characters, and plot. Theme in a work of fiction is what is meaningful and significant to human experience generally. Themes are the ideas and truths that transcend the specific characters and plot. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is about an ambitious nobleman who, encouraged by his equally ambitious wife, murders the king of Scotland in order to become king himself. The themes in Macbeth include the power of ambition to corrupt even those who are worthy and the mortal consequences of denying what is fundamental to one’s nature.

- thesis The central point, a statement of position in a formal or logical argument. Also used to refer to the topic or controlling idea of an essay. Use of the term thesis implies elaboration by reasons and examples.

- tone The attitude of the writer toward the subject and toward the reader.

- transition A link between ideas or sections in a work. In prose arguments, single words such as first, second, moreover, and therefore or phrases such as in addition, on the other hand, and in conclusion serve as transitions. In fiction, a brief passage or chapter may serve as a transition. In The Great Gatsby, the narrator pauses from time to time to “fill in” the reader and to account for the passage of time between the dramatic episodes that make up the novel’s main plot.

- turning point In drama and fiction, the moment or episode in a plot when the action is moved toward its inevitable conclusion.

- verisimilitude A literal quality in fiction and drama of being “true to life,” of representing that which is real or actual. Verisimilitude in fiction is often achieved through specific, vivid description and dialogue; first-person narration also creates the effect of verisimilitude. In drama, it may be achieved through means of set, costumes, and lighting that are realistic in all their details.