A to Z of Junior Cycle English Terms

Junior Cycle English · Literary Terms

Here are the terms you need across poetry, fiction, drama and film, gathered in one place and written in plain English. Use it as a quick check before an exam, or whenever a word in class leaves you guessing. Read a definition, find the term when you study, and you will start spotting these techniques in everything you read.

A to C

• Alliteration: the repeating of the same starting sound in words that sit close together, as in “wild and windy”.
• Allusion: a brief reference to another text, person or event that the writer expects you to recognise.
• Antagonist: the character or force that works against the main character and creates conflict.
• Aside: a short remark a character speaks in a play that the audience hears but the other characters do not.
• Assonance: the repeating of similar vowel sounds in nearby words, as in “deep green sea”.
• Atmosphere: the overall feeling a piece of writing creates around you, such as tense, calm or eerie.
• Characterisation: the way a writer builds a character through what they say, do, think and how others react to them.
• Climax: the moment of greatest tension or importance, when the story reaches its turning point.
• Connotation: the feelings or ideas a word suggests beyond its plain dictionary meaning, so “home” hints at warmth and safety.

D to G

• Dialogue: the words characters speak to one another, shown in speech marks in fiction and after names in a play.
• Dramatic irony: when the audience knows something important that a character on stage does not.
• Enjambment: when a line of poetry runs on into the next without a pause at the line end.
• Figurative language: language that means more than its literal sense, including simile, metaphor and personification.
• First person: a story told from inside one character using “I” and “we”.
• Flashback: a scene that jumps back to show something that happened before the present moment of the story.
• Foil: a character whose qualities contrast with another and make that other character stand out more clearly.
• Foreshadowing: a hint early in a text that prepares you for something that happens later.
• Free verse: poetry that has no fixed rhyme or regular rhythm and follows the writer’s own pattern.
• Genre: a type or category of writing, such as horror, comedy, romance or science fiction.

H to N

• Imagery: descriptive language that appeals to your senses and builds a clear picture in your mind.
• Irony: a gap between what is said or expected and what is actually meant or what really happens.
• Metaphor: a comparison that says one thing is another, as in “the classroom was a zoo”.
• Mise en scene: everything placed within a film shot, such as setting, lighting, costume and props, and how it is arranged.
• Mood: the feeling the writing stirs in you as the reader, closely linked to atmosphere.
• Motif: an image, idea or detail that repeats through a text and builds meaning each time it returns.
• Narrator: the voice that tells the story, who may be a character in it or an outside observer.
• Onomatopoeia: a word that imitates the sound it describes, such as “buzz”, “crash” or “hiss”.

O to R

• Personification: giving human qualities or actions to something that is not human, as in “the wind whispered”.
• Plot: the sequence of events in a story and the way they connect and lead on from one another.
• Point of view: the position from which a story is told, such as first person or third person.
• Protagonist: the main character, the one whose story we follow most closely.
• Register: the level of formality in language, ranging from casual and chatty to formal and serious.
• Repetition: deliberately saying a word, phrase or idea more than once for emphasis or effect.
• Rhyme: matching sounds at the ends of words, most often at the ends of lines in poetry.
• Rhythm: the beat or pattern of stressed and unstressed sounds you hear when a poem is read aloud.

S to Z

• Setting: the time and place in which a story or scene happens.
• Simile: a comparison of two things using “like” or “as”, as in “as quiet as a mouse”.
• Soliloquy: a speech in a play where a character, alone on stage, says their thoughts aloud for the audience.
• Stage directions: the instructions in a play that tell actors how to move, speak and behave, and set the scene.
• Stanza: a group of lines in a poem set apart from other groups, a bit like a paragraph.
• Symbolism: when an object, colour or image stands for a bigger idea, so a dove can stand for peace.
• Theme: the central idea or message a text explores, such as friendship, loss or courage.
• Tone: the writer’s attitude towards the subject, which might be playful, angry, sad or serious.

How to use this glossary

How to use it: simply naming a term earns you very little; the marks come when you explain its effect on the reader and link it to the meaning of the text. It is far better to know a handful of terms really well and use them confidently than to memorise the whole list and only name them. Pick a few that suit the texts you have studied, learn them properly, and practise writing one full sentence on the effect each one creates.

In short

Learn what these terms mean, then push past the label to the effect, and you will write about every text with far more confidence.