Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
In common usage and linguistics, concision (also called conciseness, succinctness, [1] terseness, brevity, or laconicism) is a communication principle [2] of eliminating redundancy, [3] generally achieved by using as few words as possible in a sentence while preserving its meaning. More generally, it is achieved through the omission of parts ...
Acrostic: a poem in which the first letter of each line spells out a word, name, or phrase when read vertically. Example: “A Boat beneath a Sunny Sky” by Lewis Carroll. Concrete (aka pattern): a written poem or verse whose lines are arranged as a shape/visual image, usually of the topic. Slam; Sound; Spoken-word; Verbless poetry: a poem ...
A laconic phrase or laconism is a concise or terse statement, especially a blunt and elliptical rejoinder. [1] [2] It is named after Laconia, the region of Greece including the city of Sparta, whose ancient inhabitants had a reputation for verbal austerity and were famous for their often pithy remarks.
Biography: a written narrative of a person's life; an autobiography is a self-written biography. Memoir: a biographical account of a particular event or period in a person's life (rather than their whole life) drawn from personal knowledge or special sources (such as the spouse of the subject). Misery literature; Slave narrative. Contemporary ...
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary (officially titled The Concise Oxford Dictionary until 2002, and widely abbreviated COD or COED) is one of the best-known of the 'smaller' Oxford dictionaries. The latest edition contains over 240,000 entries and 1,728 pages ("concise" compared to the OED at over 21,000 pages).
A value judgment definition of literature considers it as consisting solely of high quality writing that forms part of the belles-lettres ("fine writing") tradition. [14] An example of this is in the 1910–1911 Encyclopædia Britannica , which classified literature as "the best expression of the best thought reduced to writing".
Overwriting is a simple compound of the English prefix "over-" ("excessive") and "writing", and as the name suggests, means using extra words that add little value. One rhetoric professor described it as "a wordy writing style characterized by excessive detail, needless repetition, overwrought figures of speech, and/or convoluted sentence ...