• Alliteration – repetition of sounds at the beginning of words
• Allusion – refer to or quote a powerful text/source that people already know
• Assonance – same but with vowels and not necessarily at the beginning of words
• Atmosphere – also known as mood/impression
• Attitude – ideas, opinions, assertions on matters
• Audience – who will respond (think not forced into it as we are)
• Bias – favouring one thing/person over another
• Cadence – inflection of the voice
• Colloquial – informal language, conversational, slang
• Compare/Contrast – look at more than one text and point out differences
• Connotations
• Consonance – as above, with consonants
• Context – background, situation etc
• Diction
• Effective – whether the text has worked (in terms of purpose/effect)
• Emotive language – appeals to emotions
• Enjambment – poetic device, when a sentence is continued on the next line with no pause (seen in Coleridge)
• Euphemism – a word or phrase substituting one which may be considered too direct e.g. “birds and bees” v. sex
• Facial expression
• Filming techniques
o Angles – up (superior), down (inferior), same (neutral)
o Body language
o CGI
o Cinematography
o Contrasts in colour
o Costume
o Editing/Transitions – cut (speed up), dissolve (dramatic pause), fade (major change), defocus (slows pace), wipe (certain genres)
o Framing – boundaries of the image incl. aspect ratio
o Lighting
o Mise-en-scene
o Montage
o Movement
o Sound Effects
o Timing
o Visual Effects
• Formal language – precise, correct, often harsh or impersonal
• Humour
• Hyperbole/minimisation – over exaggeration/understating
• Idiom – a style of expression peculiar grammatically and often identified with certain groups or languages e.g. English phrases such as “to keep tabs on”
• Impression conveyed – you ought to mention this, as in, what you feel is brought across by the composer
• Juxtaposition – placing two opposing things side by side, good for conflict
• Lists of three – three-part structures as in Lincoln’s speech, very memorable
• Metaphor – Implicit comparison though designating one thing as another e.g. “in a world of hurt” or “a sea of troubles”
• Objective/Subjective tone
• Onomatopoeia – *bang*
• Persuasive – how well the writer can change your views (propaganda)
• Punny headline
• Purpose – desired result
• Register – use of vocabulary for a particular purpose/to particular people
• Repetition/Parallel Sentence Structure – repeating the same phrase or words/particularly at the beginning of a number of sentences
• Rhetorical question – questions which are silently answered in the mind of the audience
• Rhythm/Rhyme – should be self evident
• Sensory imagery – Words which invoke images e.g. warm dusty trail etc
• Simile – A “like” or “as” statement comparing two essentially unlike things
• Speculate – engage in reasoning based on inconclusive evidence (i.e. BSing)
• Stanza – grouping of lines in a poem
• Structure – how is the argument set out? Is it logical? Stream-of-consciousness?
• Style – what are the distinguishing characteristics of the work?
• Symbolism – using an object or sentence to explain or represent something else
• Tone – attitude presented, choice of language
