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Dramatic Terminology
Tragedy: A narrative about serious and important actions that end unhappily, usually with the death of the main characters.
The play is broken up into acts and the acts are broken up into scenes.
Monologue: A long uninterrupted speech given by one character onstage to everyone.
Soliloquy: A long uninterrupted speech given by one character alone on stage, inaudible to other characters
Aside: A short speech given by one character, traditionally the other characters cannot hear.
Pun: A humorous play on words. (Example: After that poisonous snake struck at me in the Arizona Desert I was really rattled.)
Dramatic Foil: A pair of characters who are opposite in many ways and highlight or exaggerate each other’s differences.
Poetic Terminology
Blank Verse: Unrhymed meter; unrhymed iambic pentameter specifically.
Iambic Meter: Each unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable.
Couplets: Two consecutive lines that rhyme (aa bb cc). Usually followed when a character leaves or a scene ends.
End-stopped Line: Has some form of punctuation at the end of the line (,;.!?).
Run-on Line: Has NO punctuation at the end of the line and meaning is continued to following lines.
Sonnet: A fourteen line poem using iambic pentameter and the following rhyme scheme: abab cdcd efef gg.
Internal Rhyme: Words rhyming inside one line.
End Line Rhyme: Words rhyming at the end of consecutive lines.
Perfect vs. Slant Rhyme: ball & hall are a perfect rhyme (end sounds the same). Ball & bell are slant rhymes (beginning and end sounds the same; middle sound is different).
Alliteration: the repetition of the same beginning consonants
Assonance: the repetition of the same vowel sounds in the middle of words
Consonance: the repetition of the same ending consonants
Onomatopoeia: words that are spelled much like how they sound.