"The weight of this sad time we must obey,/ Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say."

OK, maybe Edgar's words don't exactly capture your feelings about the end of the year. But, it's just about over.

If you haven't already done so, please see Edline for all of the vocabulary lists, study sheets, and practice sheets for the first essay.

Advanced Literary Terms (the original sheets are now also in the Vocabulary folder on Edline):

Anaphora: is emphasizing words by repeating them at the beginnings of neighboring clauses
eg. “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing-grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills” (Winston Churchill).

Asyndeton: is a stylistic scheme in which conjunctions are deliberately omitted from a series of related clauses
e.g., “I came, I saw, I conquered” (Caesar).

Chiasmus: is the figure of speech in which two or more clauses are related to each other through a reversal of structures in order to make a larger point; that is, the clauses display inverted parallelism
e.g., “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” (JFK).

Polysyndeton: is the use of several conjunctions in close succession, especially where some might be omitted
e.g., “And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark” (Genesis 7:22-24).

Zeugma: is a figure of speech describing the joining of two or more parts of a sentence with a single common verb or noun. A zeugma employs both ellipsis, the omission of words which are easily understood, and parallelism, the balance of several words or phrases.
e.g., “He stole both her car and her heart that fateful night.”

Hyperbole: a deliberate, extravagant, and often outrageous exaggeration
eg. “The shot heard ‘round the world.”

Understatement: the opposite of hyperbole. It is a kind of irony that deliberately represents something as being much less than it really is
e.g., “I could probably manage to survive on a salary of two million dollars per year.”

Sarcasm: the use of verbal irony in which a person appears to be praising something but is actually insulting it
e.g., “As I fell down the stairs headfirst, I heard her say, ‘Look at that coordination.’”

Antithesis: a direct juxtaposition of structurally parallel words, phrases, or clauses for the purpose of contrast
e.g., “Sink or swim.”

Conceit – 1. a figure of speech in which two completely unlike things are compared; these comparisons are usually very intellectual in nature
2. extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs an entire poem or poetic passage
e.g., “An example from popular culture is the way many cartoons feature animals that can speak to each other, and in many cases can understand human speech, but humans cannot understand the speech of animals”

Foil – a character who is used as a contrast to another character in order to emphasize the differences between the two characters.
e.g. Edgar is a foil for Edmund and vice versa.