Glossary of Terms: Non-fiction Prose Allusion: a reference to a person, place, event or object; usually from history, the Bible, literature, or mythology. Allusions add compression to a work. For example, the name of the main character in Leacock's essay "The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones" is an allusion to Melpomene, the muse of tragedy in Greek mythology. Recognizing that allusion, we appreciate more fully the intent of Leacock's narrative essay. Ambiguity: a vagueness in writing that makes possible more than one interpretation. When used deliberately and effectively, it adds compression, communicating more than one level of meaning at the same time. Analogy: an expository technique in which a comparison is made between unlike things. In many analogies the writer compares something abstract and difficult with something concrete and easier to grasp. The purpose of the analogy is usually to help the reader understand the more difficult concept. In her essay "How Pain Engenders Greatness," Amiel compares the Royal Ontario Museum to the middle ground of human experience in order to explain how Canadian culture lacks sublimity and greatness. Analysis: as a type of writing, analysis usually refers to literary criticism, which treats a work as a self-contained entity that can be understood better by examining in detail how its pans work in relation to each other and to the whole. More generally, the term analysis can be used to describe writing in which the author seeks to explain a phenomenon. An example of this is the essay "What Makes Us Fall in Love?" Anecdote: in writing, an anecdote is a short narrative episode, usually included to introduce a subject or to make a point. It differs from the short story in that it is not so much concerned with developing plot or character as it is with relating an occurrence. For example, in "What Makes Us Fall in Love?", Lasswell and Lobsenz begin with an anecdote that sets up the main question of their essay. Antithesis: a rhetorical device in which one idea is set against a sharply contrasting idea, often but not necessarily in the same sentence. More effective antithetical statements balance the first idea against the second by setting each in parallel grammatical structure. In his essay "The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech," Faulkner expresses a central idea using antithesis: "He writes not of the heart but of the glands." In "Killing for Sport," Joseph Wood Krutch sets up a powerful antithesis in two sentences: "When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of man, we call him 'Vandal'. When he wantonly destroys one of the works of God, we call him 'Sportsman'." Argument: a form of prose in which the writer's purpose is to influence the reader to accept a particular side of a debatable issue. It is one of the four basic forms of prose, the others being exposition, narration, and description. Joseph Wood Krutch's essay is an excellent example of argument. Audience: in writing, the particular individual or group that a work seems to address or appeal to. John Amagoalik's essay "We Must Have Dreams" may be described as written mainly for the Inuit readers; however, it offers other readers insights into an important concern. Balance: in a sentence, the balancing of phrases or clauses that are similar in structure. This rhetorical device is usually used to emphasize contrasting or similar ideas. In "The Uncertainty of Friendship" Johnson uses a balanced sentence to emphasize similarity of ideas: "Suspicion is always hardening the cautious, and disgust repelling the delicate."
Cause-effect: a type of prose that has as its purpose to show a cause-effect relationship between ideas or events. For example, Hugh MacLennan, in "On Living in a Cold Country," attempts to show how writers are produced by the setting in which they grow up and by their early experiences in life. Chronological: organized according to time; in order of occurrence. In "Four Generations," Joyce Maynard adheres to the chronological order of events as she describes her visit with her grandmother. Clarity: the quality of clearness or directness in writing. Clarity is most often achieved through concreteness and plainness in diction. Cliche: expression or word that has been used so much that it no longer has vividness or freshness. A description such as "the clouds were fluffy wisps of cotton on the horizon" is not effective because the metaphor has been used too often. Writing that uses cliches is also called trite or hackneyed. Climactic Order: the arrangement of ideas or details in ascending order of importance. Margaret Laurence reserves her most critical concern for last in her essay "Open Letter to the Mother of Joe Bass." She begins with a specific concern and explores it carefully, moving finally to her closing sentence, which disturbs the reader in its implications. Coherence: a basic principle of writing that asserts that the parts of an essay must relate to each other clearly and logically. Coherence differs from unity in that unity refers to each part relating to the central theme or idea. Colloquialism: language or an expression that is acceptable in informal conversation but not in formal writing. Colloquial language falls between proper English and slang. Comparison/Contrast: an expository method used by writers whose purpose is to examine the similarities and/or differences between subjects of the same type. The aim of a comparison/contrast is usually to arrive at a deeper understanding of both subjects. In his essay "A Nice Place to Visit" Russell Baker compares New York and Toronto, giving the reader a better understanding of each city's characteristics. Connotation: the additional meanings associated with a word or phrase, beyond the basic denotative level (dictionary meaning). These meanings result from personal or shared associations. In "Killing for Sport," for example, Joseph Wood Krutch uses several highly connotative words that reveal his feelings about hunting. Some examples are "kill," "pure evil," "wicked," "liar," "swindler," "thief," "murderer," and "killer forsport." Context: the personal, social, or historical circumstances or background that need to be known if a reader is to appreciate fully the significance of a work. For example, understanding that Faulkner gave his acceptance speech in 1950, five years after Hiroshima, helps the reader to understand the urgency of Faulkner's concerns. Contrast, see Comparison/Contrast Deductive Reasoning: a method of exposition in which the writer applies a known or established generalization to a single or specific situation, believing that the first will explain the second. In short, deduction is reasoning from the general to the specific. See Inductive Reasoning for the opposite pattern. In a "Nice Place to Visit," Russell
Baker begins with a generalization about Toronto and then proceeds to give specific examples in support of it. Development: the strategies a writer uses to support and illustrate the key ideas in an essay. Writers may use such methods as giving details, providing examples, relating an anecdote, using an analogy, citing statistics, or quoting expert opinion. Diction: simply put, it is the choice of words used in writing. Effectively used words are often selected on the basis of several criteria, such as precision of meaning, sound value, and connotative associations. Didactic: a term describing the tone or style used by a writer whose purpose or intent is to provide guidance or instruction, particularly in religious or moral matters. Schweitzer's "Reverence for Life" might be described as didactic in tone. In it he instructs the reader in a particular view of a moral concern. Emphasis: giving proper emphasis to the more important ideas in a sentence, paragraph, or essay. Epigram: a short, often witty, concisely-worded saying that makes a point. One example is this: "Man proposes but God disposes." Essay: a prose composition, brief enough to be read in one sitting, in which a writer presents views on a particular topic. Euphemism: the use of mild or inoffensive words or expressions in place of those that might be viewed as overly direct or offensive. For example, many people say "passed away" for "died." Exaggeration: also known as hyperbole and overstatement, exaggeration is making something out to be more than what it is. Exaggeration, which involves deliberate dramatizing, is used mostly for emphasis or humor, or both. Nicol uses exaggeration to achieve humor in "Meaty Tale" when he writes: "We don't have dinner, we have a clinic." Exposition: a form of prose in which the writer's purpose is to explain through the presentation of ideas focusing on a particular topic. Exposition is one of four basic types of composition; the other three are argument, narration, and description. Fallacy: a flaw or weakness in the logic of a particular argument. A writer might, for example, be guilty of making a sweeping generalization that is faulty because it allows for no exceptions. Familiar Essay: a personal, casual, informal essay in which the writer shares his or her views on an everyday concern. While Dimensions contains a number of informal essays, two that might be considered familiar are "Meaty Tale" and "A Nice Place to Visit." Figurative Language: a general term applied to language that departs from normal or expected order and use, usually for the purposes of achieving vivid imagery, fresh description, or clear insight into a thought or experience. Figurative language refers to such concepts as simile, metaphor, personification, and hyperbole. One essay which presents excellent examples of figurative language is Eiseley's "The Bird and the Snake."
Formal Essay, an essay which is characterized by a seriousness of tone, careful use of logical organization, and an intent to persuade or inform. Often, the writer attempts to be deliberately objective, and the language is scholarly in nature. Samuel Johnson's "The Uncertainty of Friendship" is an example of a formal essay. Imagery: Words or phrases that create a mental picture. Imagery can be divided into two categories: literal and figurative. Literal images are those that describe, with no intended added levels of meaning. A description of a room, for example, as "large and low-ceilinged, with dark furniture set off against a beige carpet and walls" is made up of images that are intended to paint a picture of the room and suggest its atmosphere. Figurative images create pictures as well, but they move words beyond their basic meaning. The description of a house as "shut up securely against the joys of the outside world, brooding behind high, darkly dusty hedges and wild growths of ivy" creates a basic picture while suggesting atmosphere and symbolism. Inductive Reasoning, an expository technique in which the writer examines specific evidence and draws from it a generalization. See Deductive Reasoning for the opposite pattern. In "The Game of Our Lives" Gzowski examines his specific experiences with hockey and tries to generalize about their significance. Inference: a conclusion drawn from facts that have been presented or statements that have been made. Inversion: the intentional reversing of normal sentence order. A rhetorical device, inversion is used to gain emphasis. Consider the sentence, "Hunger was our immediate concern." It emphasizes the problem of hunger more effectively than does the sentence, "Our immediate concern was hunger." Irony: a general term used to describe the recognized contrast between what something is and what it appears to be. Irony is often divided into three types: verbal irony, which refers to the difference between what is said and what was intended; dramatic irony, which describes a situation in which the audience possesses knowledge hidden from one or more characters in a drama; and situational irony, which refers to the difference between what actually happens and what would seem appropriate. Juxtaposition: the deliberate side-by-side placement of words, images, or sentences that would not normally be associated. Juxtaposition, often startling, is used to add meaning and emphasis. Several examples are evident in Kinsella's "Junk Mail Junkie"; for example, "To an addict, a day without junk mail is hell. By the end of every weekend I was a retching, pitiful excuse for a man.'' Metaphor: an implied comparison between two things that are essentially unlike. Loren Eiseley, in "The Bird and the Snake," compares the scales of snakes to armor in, "I thought of the eggs somewhere about, and whether they were to elongate and writhe into an armor of scales..." Mood: the emotional attitude of a literary work. A writer can, for example, convey a feeling such as pessimism through rhythm of language, choice of words, details emphasized, and so forth. While some sources do not differentiate between mood and tone, we find it helpful to define tone as referring specifically to the writer's or speaker's attitude toward the subject matter or audience. In ' 'Life with the Bomb", the essay's mood is a blend of optimism and pessimism, but the tone is perhaps more one of seriousness about the nuclear issue and concern for the writer's daughter's generation. Parallel Structure: The placing of the pans of a composition (words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs) in structures that are similar in phrasing and development. The purpose is to emphasize ideas that are of equal importance. For
example, in "The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech," Faulkner emphasizes the significance of each noun in his sentence, "It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past." Paraphrase: to restate a written passage in one's own words, following the order in which ideas are presented. Sometimes a paraphrasing is longer than the original because the concern is to express clearly and fully the ideas in the passage. Parody: a literary work which imitates the style, form, and/or concerns of another specific work or of a type of writing. The purpose of a parody usually is to entertain, but the form can also be used to make a serious point. Persona: a mask or identity a writer adopts and presents as the suggested speaker in a particular work. In his essay "A Nice Place to Visit," for example, Russell Baker adopts the persona of a delegate who deliberately flies to Toronto to investigate how it compares to New York. Personification: a figure of speech in which objects, ideas, or animals are given distinctively human qualities. The writer who describes trees as "huddling together, whispering against the wind" is using personification. Point of View: as applied to fiction, this term describes the vantage point from which the author relates a story. The four most common points of view are the first person, limited omniscient, omniscient, and objective. Precis: a summary of the most essential points in a work. Prose: a general term used to describe oral or written speech that is not set within regular meter. Prose and poetry often overlap in characteristics, but prose is less controlled by obligations to patterns of rhythm, free of concerns with versification, and obligated to adhere to the conventions of sentence structure (unless a special effect is intended). Purpose: the controlling reason behind a work; what the selection attempts to achieve. Some essays, for example, might be written chiefly to inform or persuade, while others might be written to entertain, to describe, to criticize, or to analyze. The purposes of essays are many. We might describe the purpose of "What Makes Us Fall in Love?" as to analyze, while the purpose of "Meaty Tale" might be described as to entertain. Rhetoric: the art of expressing ideas effectively. Rhetoric embraces the rules of good writing and speaking, but goes beyond mere correctness by being concerned with such areas as word choice, arrangement of ideas, paragraphing, and organization. It is more than expressing ideas clearly; it is the use of principles to express those ideas as effectively as possible. On another secondary level, rhetoric refers to writing which is intended to influence or persuade. Rhetorical Question: a question posed for effect, and not followed by or inviting a reply. The intent of the rhetorical question is to introduce a topic or to focus the reader on a concern. John Amagoalik, in "We Must Have Dreams," poses rhetorical questions when he asks: What kind of world would we live in if people did not have dreams? If people did not strive for what they believe in?" In contrast to the other questions he poses in his essay, Amagoalik does not go on to answer these two. Rather, he invites the reader to speculate for a moment.
Satire: a literary work that combines humor and criticism. The aim of satire is to reveal a human or social weakness and provoke change. Sentence: the basic unit of thought in our language. Sentences can be described in a number of ways, usually according to structure (simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex) or purpose (declarative, interrogatory, imperative, and exclamatory). A second way of categorizing sentences according to structure involves labeling them as loose or periodic. A loose sentence is one in which the main thought is given near the start of the sentence and followed by added details or developing points. For example, in "Back to Wolf Willow", Stegner uses a loose sentence to describe his town: "My town used to be as bare as a picked bone, with no tree anywhere around it larger than a ten foot willow or alder.'' A periodic sentence is the opposite; the sentence must be read through before the main thought is completed. Later in Stegner's essay, for example, he uses a periodic sentence in sharing a key thought: "Sitting in the sticky-smelling, nostalgic air of the Greek's confectionary store, I am afflicted with the sense of how many whom I have known are dead, and how little evidence I have that I myself have lived what I remember." Simile: a directly expressed comparison between two objects that are essentially unalike. Most similes use "like" or "as"; we see an example of this in a sentence Christie McLaren wrote in "Suitcase Lady", when she describes how the Vicomtesse put on her tiara: "Like a little girl, she smooths back her dirty hair and proudly puts it on." Structure: the larger organizational pattern of a work. In considering structure, the reader examines both the logic and effect of an organizational pattern. (See Inductive and Deductive Reasoning for two common structural patterns.) Style: the overall texture of a literary work; the particular manner in which the ideas have been expressed. Style is comprised of many elements, the major ones being diction, figurative language, sentences, and tone (see respective definitions for further details). Words used to describe the style of a work are best when they are precise, suggesting specific qualities, such as ornate, plain, terse, scholarly, or casual. (Words describing the manner of writing should not be confused with words that describe the tone of the writing. Students sometimes mistakenly describe style in "tone" words, such as angry, condescending, joyful, or serious.) Subject Matter: the topic and basic ideas expressed in a work. Subject matter includes the topic (subject written about), thesis (main controlling idea), subordinate points, and supporting details. The arrangement of these ideas is embraced in the term ' 'structure." Subjective: a term describing writing in which the author expresses personal beliefs or thoughts. In the opposite approach, objective writing, the author aims at remaining impartial or neutral, setting personal feelings aside in favor of achieving a recognized purpose, such as informing the reader. Symbol: an object or action which represents something other than what it is. Experienced readers recognize two types of symbol. Conventional symbols (such as white representing purity, water representing life) are commonly acknowledged by readers. Personal symbols, in contrast, are those symbols deliberately created within a writer's work and specific to that work. For example, in his essay "The Bird and the Snake,'' Loren Eiseley endows the huge slabs of rock with symbolic value. The context of his essay and the emphasis he places on the rocks help them to become representative of permanence in the universe, in contrast to the individual human being's brief lifespan.
Synthesis: is a process that logically follows analysis. In analysis, the entity is broken into parts which are examined in detail. Synthesis is the recombining of the pans into a new, complex whole. Theme: in fiction, poetry, and drama, theme tends to refer to the work's implied generalization about life. In nonfiction, or the essay, theme is more often used to mean the same as "thesis" (below). In some areas, theme is used to refer to a composition on a specific topic, as in, "I have to write an English theme by Friday." Thesis: the main idea, position or view of the essay writer; the hypothesis at the heart of a writer's work. Sometimes, the thesis is stated explicitly, usually in the opening paragraph. In "Killing for Sport," for example, Joseph Wood Krutch makes his thesis clear at the end of the introductory paragraph: "I can also easily prove, to my satisfaction, that killing 'for sport' is the perfect type of that pure evil which metaphysicians have sometimes sought." Often, though, the thesis is implicit, requiring the reader to formulate it. In "The Company Man", for instance, Ellen Goodman lets the reader derive the thesis that "some businesses use their employees with no regard for their individual needs as human beings.'' Tone: the implied attitude of the writer (or persona) toward the subject matter or audience. Tone differs from mood, which describes more generally the emotional feeling of a work. It differs, as well, from style, which is the larger, more embracing term. Two very different sentences can contain the same feeling (tone) but be framed in different words (style). See "Style" for further clarification. While several essays in this text have a very strong tone, three that provide excellent examples are "Reverence for Life" (serious tone), "A Nice Place to Visit" (ironic tone), and "Leaving Home" (nostalgic tone). Topic: the subject of a work. In "Defending the Vigors of Old Age," Simma Holt writes on the topic of societal attitudes toward growing old. Topic Sentence: a sentence which contains the main idea of the paragraph in which it occurs. Usually placed at the start (and sometimes the end) of the paragraph, it is developed by the remaining sentences in the paragraph. Transitions: in writing, words or phrases that link ideas, sentences, or paragraphs, making it easier for the reader to understand how ideas relate. Some common transitional words are series markers such as firstly, secondly, next, finally, etc.; or more general transitions such as therefore, furthermore, on the other hand, in contrast, etc. Treatise: an extensive formal examination of a subject, usually in considerable length, in contrast to the essay. Unity: a basic principle of writing which maintains that each part of a work should relate to a single purpose. In this way, the work can be said to possess unity. Vehicle: the particular form of writing selected by an author. The genres can be viewed as vehicles of writing; seen more generally, however, each genre, such as the essay, contains finer divisions or types of writing. Often, essays can be divided into their basic type (narration, description, argument, exposition), or into more conventional forms (such as the letter, column, prepared speech, criticism, article, diary, etc.). Vernacular: in writing, the expression of ideas in language characteristic of everyday speech, as opposed to more formal written English.