Page 25 - Year 10

English Language & literature: 2 of 4 English Literature: 3 of 4

When analysing both language and literature texts, it is essential to use the correct analytical verb so that
you can precisely explain a writer’s choices. • Poetry Terminology – English Literature Paper 2

Analytical verb​ Meaning • Mood – the tone or atmosphere created by the poet, affecting the readers’ feelings.
• Narrator – voice from whose perspective the poem is written: not the same as the poet.

Emphasises​ Makes clearer to an audience by focusing on something ​ • Perspective – The point of view from which the poem is written.
• Persona – If the voice in the poem is a specific person or character it is referred to as the persona.
Conveys To get across a message or idea to the audience ​ • Colloquial – informal, everyday speech and language which may include slang.
• Form - the way the poem is laid out on the page. (It can refer to a specific verse form in which a number of
Highlights​ Makes the audience focus on something by making an idea stand out​ lines in a verse or stanza is repeated. It can also refer to a specific type of poem that follows a set of rules
such as those for a sonnet.)
Exaggerates​ To make something seem better or worse than it is to emphasise an idea to the audience. ​ • Structure – the pattern, order or organisation of language and ideas and how they develop and change

throughout the poem.
Illustrates​ Makes the audience visualise a particular image or idea​ • Enjambment – when a line runs on into the next line without pause, carrying the thought, image, pace and

sometimes the sound with it.
Amplifies​ Emphasises something by making it clearer by adding more detail​
• Caesura – a pause or break in the line of a poem that affects the rhythm and pace.
Indicates​ Helps the audience to see a particular idea​ • Stanza – a specific group of lines forming a unit, like a verse in a song.
2 lines – couplet ; 4 lines – quatrain
Evokes​ Make an audience feel a particular emotion​ • Volta – a turning point in the poem that marks a change of thought or emotion.

Provokes​ Makes the audience react to something ​ • Imagery – a picture created by words.
• Metaphor – one thing is used to describe another in a way that is not literally true.
Foreshadows​ Provides hints to the audience about something that may happen in the future​ • Simile – one thing compared to another using “like” or “as”
• Connotation – word association – ideas that spring to mind when a word or phrase is used.
Parallels​ Seems to be similar or the same as another part of the text, character or theme. • Personification – when ideas or things are given human feelings and characteristics.
• Alliteration – repetition of the same sound (not necessarily the same letter) in a group of words, often at the
Reiterates​ To re-emphasise to the audience; to repeat an idea for added emphasis beginning of words.
• Ambiguity – when writers, perhaps deliberately, use words or images with more than one meaning or

Symbolises​ Uses a particular image to represent a deeper meaning for the audience ​ interpretation.
• Sibilance – a hissing sound made by using “s”, “ss” “sh” or “z”.
• Rhetorical Question – asked for effect; to persuade or further an argument rather than to elicit an answer.