The technique of introducing into a narrative material that prepares the reader or audience for future events, action, or revelations.

The concluding section of a work or a speech that comes at the end of a play, often requesting the appreciation of the audience and kind reviews from critics.

A rhetorical figure involving the exact repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of successive lines or sentences.

The relatively sustained use of a concrete image or thing used to represent or suggest something more abstract.

A trope in which human characteristics are bestowed upon anything nonhuman, from an abstract idea to a physical force to an inanimate object to a living organism.

Harsh, unpleasant, or discordant sounds.

An ideal place that does not exist in reality.

The repetition of a final consonant sound or sounds following different vowel sounds in proximate words.

A contradiction or incongruity between appearance or expectation and reality.

“They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your/painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys./And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen/the gunman kill and go free to kill again” (Carl Sandburg, “Chicago”).

“During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher” (Edgar Allen Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”).

Blade and blood, and flash and flesh in the following passage: “Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade/How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;/Blue with all malice, like a madman’s flash;/And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh” (Wilfred Owen, “Arms and the Boy”).

“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” (Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream”).

“[T]he wind whines overhead,/Coming down from the mountain,/Whistling between the arbors” (Theodore Roethke, “The Storm”).

Speech or writing that attacks, insults, or denounces a person, topic, or institution.

A rhetorical figure involving the deliberate omission of conjunctions to create a concise, terse, and often memorable statement.

The art of persuasion through speaking and writing.

An erroneous argument dependent upon an unsound or illogical contention.

A rhetorical figure involving a reversal of word order to make a point.