Praxis 5038 flashcards
Praxis 5038 · Build recall with a focused review session.
32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- Iambic pentameter
- A metrical line of five iambs, each an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, for ten syllables total; common in English sonnets and Shakespeare's plays.
- Blank verse
- Unrhymed poetry written in iambic pentameter. It approximates natural English speech and appears in Shakespeare's plays and Milton's Paradise Lost.
- Dramatic irony
- A situation in which the audience knows something a character does not, so the character's words or actions carry meaning the character cannot perceive.
- Free verse
- Poetry with no fixed meter or rhyme scheme; it creates form through line breaks, rhythm, repetition, and imagery instead of regular stress patterns.
- Synecdoche
- A figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole or the whole for a part, as in 'all hands on deck' meaning all sailors.
- Foil character
- A character whose traits contrast with another character's, usually the protagonist, so that the protagonist's qualities stand out more clearly by comparison.
- Shakespearean sonnet
- A fourteen-line poem arranged in three quatrains and a closing couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg, often turning in thought at the final couplet.
- Soliloquy
- A speech in which a character, typically alone on stage, reveals inner thoughts and motives to the audience rather than to other characters in the play.
- Ethos
- A rhetorical appeal to the speaker's credibility, character, or authority, built through demonstrated expertise, fairness, and trustworthy presentation of sources.
- Pathos
- A rhetorical appeal to the audience's emotions, values, or needs, often produced through vivid description, personal anecdote, and connotative word choice.
- Logos
- A rhetorical appeal to logic and reason, constructed from evidence, data, and patterns of reasoning such as cause and effect, comparison, or analogy.
- Straw man fallacy
- Misrepresenting an opponent's argument in a weaker or distorted form, then refuting that invented version instead of the actual claim that was made.
- False dilemma
- A fallacy that presents only two alternatives when other options exist, forcing the audience to choose between extremes that do not exhaust the possibilities.
- Text structure
- The organizational pattern of an informational text, such as chronological, sequential, compare-contrast, cause-effect, problem-solution, or description, signaled by transition words.
- Loaded language
- Word choice carrying strong emotional connotations that pushes readers toward a judgment without offering reasons, and often signals author bias.
- Primary source
- Firsthand evidence or testimony created at the time of an event, such as a diary, photograph, law, data set, or eyewitness account; secondary sources analyze such material.
- Phoneme
- The smallest unit of sound that distinguishes meaning in a language; changing one phoneme, as in pat to bat, changes the word.
- Morpheme
- The smallest unit of meaning in a word; 'cats' contains two morphemes, the root 'cat' and the plural suffix '-s'.
- Free morpheme
- A morpheme that can stand alone as a complete word, such as 'book' or 'run', as opposed to a bound morpheme like '-ing'.
- Derivational affix
- A prefix or suffix that changes a word's meaning or part of speech, as '-ness' turns the adjective 'kind' into the noun 'kindness'.
- Semantics vs. pragmatics
- Semantics studies the literal meaning of words and sentences, while pragmatics studies how context, speaker intent, and social convention shape interpretation.
- Register
- The variety of language selected for a situation, shaped by formality, audience, and purpose, ranging from casual conversation to academic prose.
- Code-switching
- Shifting between languages or dialects within a conversation or text, often to match the audience, setting, or the identity the speaker wishes to project.
- Middle English
- The stage of English from roughly 1100 to 1500, following the Norman Conquest, marked by heavy French vocabulary influence in works such as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
- Writing process stages
- Prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing; writers loop back among these stages rather than completing them once in strict order.
- Thesis statement
- A single sentence that states an essay's central claim and usually previews its main supporting reasons; it governs the content and organization of the whole piece.
- Comma splice
- An error that joins two independent clauses with only a comma; it is repaired with a period, a semicolon, or a comma plus coordinating conjunction.
- Semicolon use
- A semicolon joins two independent clauses not connected by a conjunction and also separates items in a list whose elements contain internal commas.
- Active listening
- Fully attending to a speaker, paraphrasing and questioning to confirm understanding, and withholding judgment until the speaker's message is complete.
- Formative assessment
- Ongoing, low-stakes checks during instruction that produce feedback used to adjust teaching and learning before a final evaluation occurs.
- Analytic rubric
- A scoring guide that rates separate criteria, such as ideas, organization, and conventions, on distinct scales and often describes performance levels for each criterion.
- MLA in-text citation
- A parenthetical citation giving the author's last name and page number with no comma between them, keyed to a corresponding works-cited entry.