POETRY

WHAT?

Poetry is literature that uses a few words to tell about ideas,

feelings and paints a picture in the readers mind.

Most poems were written to be read aloud.
Poems may or may not rhyme.

POINT OF VIEW IN POETRY

Poet: the author of the poem.

Speaker: the speaker of the poem is the narrator of the poem.

WHAT A POEM LOOKS LIKE

Bad Hair Day

I looked in the mirror

Line

in this poem are

with shock and with dread

to discover two antlers
had sprung from my head.

dread and head

Stanza

Rhyming words.

LINES

The way that poets arrange words into lines.

The lines may or may not be sentences.

STANZA: groups od lines in traditional poetry.

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

Words and phrases that help the reader understand.

There are many types of figurative language. The most common
forms found in poetry are:

1. Imagery: Words or phrases that appeal to the five senses:

sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Imagery is what helps
you paint a picture or imagine what is happening or what the
poet is feeling.
e.g: the hamburgers sizzled on the grill..
2. Simile: A comparison of two things using the words like or as.
e.g: her smile was bright like the sun
he is as mean as a snake.
3. Metaphor: A comparison of two things without using as or
like.
e.g: His face is a puzzle to me, I can never figure out what he
is thinking.
4. Personification: Giving an animal or an object human
qualities.
e.g: My dog smiles at me.
The house glowed with happiness.
The car was irritated when she pumped it full of cheap
gas.
5. Tone: The writers attitude towards his readers and his subject;
his mood or moral view. A writer can be formal, informal,
playful, ironic, and specially optimistic or pessimistic.
6. Mood: The feeling or atmosphere that a poet creates. Mood
can suggest an emotion (e.g: excited) or the quality of a setting
(e.g: calm or somber). In a poem, mood can be established
through word choice, line length, rhythm, etc.
7. Connotation and Denotation
Connotation: the emotional and imaginative association
surrounding a word.
Denotation: the strict dictionary meaning of a word.
e.g: You may living in a house, but we live in a home.
8. Diction: The choice of words by an author or poet. When we
explore the connotation and denotation of a poem, we are
looking at the poets diction. Many times, a poets diction can
help unlock the tone or mood of the poem.
9. Assonance: repeated vowel sounds in a line or lines of poetry.

e.g: Slow the low gradual moan came in the snowing.

Shall waver medicine thee to that sweep sleep.
10. Symbolism: when a person, place, thing, or event that has
meaning in itself also represents or stands for something else,
usually something bigger and more important.
e.g:

Sheep represents innocence.

11. Idiom: An expression where the literal meaning of the words
is not the meaning of the expression. It means something other
than what it actually says.
e.g: Its raining cats and dogs.
12. Hyperbole: Obvious and intentional exaggeration.
e.g: There are a million people in here!
I could sleep for a year!
SOUND DEVICES
1. Alliteration: Consonant sounds repeated at the beginnings of
words.
e.g: If Peter picked a peck of pickled peppers, how many pickled
peppers did Peter Piper pick?
2. Onomatopoeia: Words that imitate the sound they are naming (e.g:
buzz) or sounds tat imitate another sound (e.g: the silken, sad,
uncertain, rustling of each purple curtain...)
3. Repetition: The repeating of sounds, words, phrases, or lines in a
poem.
e.g: I like popcorn!
I like candy!
I like chips!
I like ice cram!
I need to brush my teeth!
4. Rhyme: the repetition of the same stressed vowel sound and any
succeeding sounds in two or more words.

Rhyme scheme is the pattern of end rhymes that may be

designated by assigning a different letter of the alphabet to each

All mine!" Yertle cried. "Oh, the things I now rule!

I'm king of a cow! And I'm king of a mule!

Rhyme scheme

new rhyme.

I'm king of a house! And what's more, beyond that,

I'm king of a blueberry bush and cat!

I'm Yertle the Turtle! Oh, marvelous me!

C
5. Rhythm: the pattern of sound created by the arrangement of
stressed and unstressed syllables in a line. Rhythm can be regular
or irregular.

PROSE
SHORT STORY

What? Fictional story that can be read in one sitting.

e.g: A Rose for Emily, The Cask of Amontillado, The Most
Dangerous Game.

NOVEL

What? A long prose narrative that must be read in many sittings.

e.g: Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Scarlet Letter,
The Great Gatsby.

ELEMENTS OF PROSE

Plot: the framework or skeleton of the story; a series of related

events that are linked together.
1. Basic Situation (exposition): tells the audience who the
characters are and introduces the conflict.
2. Rising Action: complications that arise when the characters
take steps to resolve their conflicts.
3. Climax: most exciting or suspenseful moment when something
happens to determine the outcome of the conflict.
4. Falling Action: the conflict is in the process of being resolved
or unraveled.
5. Resolution (denouement): untying the knot. When the
storys problem/conflict is resolved and the story ends. The
ending may be happy or tragic.
Freytags Pyramid
Gustav Freytag was a Nineteenth Century German
novelist who saw common patterns in the plots of
stories and novels and developed a diagram to analyze
them. He diagrammed a story's plot using a pyramid

Character: a person or being in a story that performs the action of

the plot.
Characterization: the process of revealing the personality of a
character in a story.
Types of Character
1. Dynamic Character: the character changes as a result of the
action of the story.
2. Static Character: the character does not change much in the
course of the story.
3. Protagonist: the main character of the story.
4. Antagonist: the character or force that comes into conflict with
the protagonist. Can be another person, animal, a force of

nature, society, the characters own conscience, etc.

Setting: the time and location in which the story takes place.
Purpose of setting:
1. Gives background information
2. Provides conflict: man vs. nature, man vs. Society.
3. Can reveal a lot about someones character
4. Provides mood or atmosphere (mood: the feeling we get when
we read a story.)
5. Can paint images for the reader (images: words that call forth

the 5 senses).
Theme: the insight about human life that is revealed in a literary
work. The golden thread woven throughout the story.
- the theme is what the author is saying through the story (its
-

deeper truth about reality)

the plot is how he says it: it is the story he uses to get his point
across.

Point of View: the direction from which the writer has chosen to

tell the story.

Conflict: it exists when a character is struggling with something or
someone. Could be a number of things: another person/animal, an
inanimate object (rock, the weather), the characters own
personality.
External Conflict: caused by something outside the character.
e.g: another character, a river, weather, society.
Man vs. Man, Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Society.
Internal Conflict: character struggles with some personal quality
that is causing trouble.

e.g: vanity, pride, selfishness, grief. (Man vs. Self).

DRAMA

WHAT?

Drama comes from the Greek word, Dran which means to

do or to act. The doing/acting makes drama.

Drama is a story told in front of an audience (directly).

ELEMENTS OF DRAMA

Playwright: the author of a play.

Actors: the people who perform the play.
Acts: the units of action.
Scenes: parts of the acts.

DRAMATIC SPEECH

Dialogue: conversation between or among characters.

Monologue: long speech by one single character (private thought).

CONFLICT

The internal or external struggle between opposing forces, ideas, or

interest that create dramatic tension.

STAGE DIRECTIONS

THEATRE

Where a play takes place.

SET

Construction on the stage that shows time/place. Could be called

scenery.

PROPS

Small movable items that the actors use to make actions look real.

CHARACTERIZATION

The playwrights technique for creating believable characters.

TYPES OF DRAMA

Drama: used to describe plays that address a serious subject.

Comedy: a form of drama that has a happy ending. Humor comes

from the dialogue and situations.

Tragedy: a form of drama in which events lead to the downfall of
the main character, often a person of great significance, like a king
or hero.