ILTS English Language Arts (207) flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Hamartia

The fatal flaw or error in judgment in a tragic protagonist that, combined with fate and circumstance, brings about the character's downfall and the catastrophe of the play.

Anagnorisis

The moment of recognition in tragedy when the protagonist moves from ignorance to knowledge about their identity, situation, or the consequences of their actions.

Peripeteia

The reversal of fortune or turn of events in a dramatic plot, often occurring at the same moment as recognition and driving the action toward catastrophe.

In medias res

A narrative technique of beginning in the middle of the action, with earlier events supplied later through flashback or exposition, characteristic of epic poetry.

Shakespearean sonnet structure

Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter in three quatrains and a closing couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg, with the volta often arriving at the couplet.

Petrarchan sonnet structure

Fourteen lines divided into an octave rhyming abbaabba and a sestet rhyming cdecde or cdcdcd, with the turn of thought falling between the two parts.

Villanelle form

A nineteen-line poem of five tercets and a closing quatrain, using two rhymes throughout and repeating two refrain lines in a fixed pattern.

Blank verse

Unrhymed poetry written in iambic pentameter, the dominant meter of English dramatic and narrative verse from the sixteenth century onward.

Metonymy

A figure of speech substituting the name of an attribute or associated object for the thing meant, as when the crown stands for the monarchy.

Synecdoche

A figure of speech in which a part stands for a whole, a whole for a part, or the material for the thing made, as in hired hands for workers.

Litotes

An understatement that affirms something by negating its opposite, as in not bad to mean good, often producing ironic or emphatic effect.

Oxymoron

A compressed paradox that joins two contradictory terms in a single phrase, such as bitter sweet or living death, drawing attention to tension in meaning.

Paradox

A statement that seems self-contradictory yet on reflection expresses a truth, frequently used in metaphysical poetry to fuse intellectual wit with emotion.

Dramatic irony

A discrepancy between what a character understands and what the audience or reader knows, creating tension or tragic effect in drama and narrative.

Situational irony

An outcome that reverses expectation, in which what actually happens differs sharply from what was anticipated by characters or readers.

Verbal irony

A speaker says one thing but means another, often the opposite, with the intended meaning signaled by tone, context, or shared knowledge with the audience.

Third-person limited point of view

Narration in third person that reports only the perceptions, thoughts, and feelings accessible to a single character, restricting information to that character's experience.

Unreliable narrator

A narrator whose account is distorted by ignorance, bias, or deception, so that readers must infer meaning that diverges from the narrator's presentation.

Free indirect discourse

A technique blending third-person narration with a character's idiom and thoughts without quotation marks, merging narrator and character voice.

Stream of consciousness

A narrative method representing the continuous flow of a character's thoughts and sensations, often without logical transitions, associated with modernist fiction.

Ethos

The rhetorical appeal grounded in the speaker's credibility, character, and authority, established through expertise, fairness, and shared values with the audience.

Pathos

The rhetorical appeal to the audience's emotions and values, used to move an audience toward judgment or action through vivid and evocative language.

Logos

The rhetorical appeal to reason and evidence, built from logical argument, data, examples, and warranted inference from premises to conclusion.

Warrant

The unstated assumption or principle that licenses the move from evidence to claim in an argument; unshared warrants are the usual source of disagreement.

Restrictive versus nonrestrictive clauses

Restrictive clauses are essential to meaning, take that for things, and are not set off by commas; nonrestrictive clauses are parenthetical, take which, and are comma-set.

Dangling modifier

An introductory participial or other modifier whose implied subject is not the subject of the main clause, producing an illogical or unintentionally comic statement.

Fewer versus less

Fewer modifies plural count nouns such as fewer students; less modifies mass nouns or quantities such as less water or less time.

Lie versus lay

Lie is intransitive and means to recline, with forms lie, lay, lain; lay is transitive and means to place something, with forms lay, laid, laid.

Miscue analysis

A diagnostic reading procedure that records oral reading errors such as substitutions, omissions, insertions, and self-corrections to reveal the cueing systems a reader uses.

Simple View of Reading

A model holding that reading comprehension is the product of decoding skill and linguistic comprehension, so weakness in either component limits overall comprehension.

Three cueing systems

The semantic, syntactic, and graphophonic sources of information readers use to identify words and construct meaning while reading connected text.

Text complexity triad

The three-part framework for judging text difficulty: quantitative readability measures, qualitative features such as structure and knowledge demands, and reader-task considerations.