APLANG Vocab Packet: T-Z

Technical Language (jargon) - the special vocabulary of a trade or profession. Writers who use technical language do so with an awareness of their audience. If the audience is a group of peers, technical language may be used freely. If the audience is a more general one, technical language should be used more sparingly and carefully so as not to sacrifice clarity.

Tension - in a work of literature, is a feeling of excitement and expectation the reader or audience feels because of the conflict, mood, or atmosphere of the work.

Texture - the way the elements of a work of prose or poetry are joined together. It suggests an association with the style of the author - whether, for instance, the author's prose is rough-hewn ( elements at odd with one another) or smooth and graceful (elements flow together naturally)

Theme - the central idea of a piece of work. There can be several themes in a single work.

Thesis - a statement of the main idea of an essay. also known as the controlling idea. may be implied rather than stated directly.

Title - a word or phrase set off at the beginning of an essay to identify the subject, to capture the main idea of the essay or to attract the reader's attention. A title may be explicit or suggestive. (Get your mind out of the gutter.) A subtitle, when used, extends or restricts the meaning of the main title.

Tone - can also be called attitude. is the way the author presents a subject. can be serious, scholarly, humorous, mournful, ironic, just to name a few. A particular tone results from a writer's diction, sentence structure, purpose, and attitude toward the subject. A correct perception of the author's tone is essential to understanding a particular literary work; misreading an ironic tone as a serious one, for instance, could lead you to miss the humor in a description or situation.

Topic sentence - states the central idea of a paragraph and thus limits and controls the subject of a paragraph. usually appears at the beginning of the paragraph, but can be put anywhere.

Transitions - words or phrases that link sentences, paragraphs, and larger units of a composition to achieve coherence. these devices include parallelism, pronoun reference, conjunction and the repetition of key ideas, as well as the many conventional transitional expressions such as moreover, on the other hand, in addition, in contrast, therefore.

Understatement - when an author assigns less significance to an event or thing than it deserves.

Voice - how the speaker of a literary work presents himself or herself to the reader. Can be loud or soft, personal or cold, strident or gentle, authoritative or hesitant or can have any manner or combination of characteristics.
Also a grammatical term e.g. active and passive verbs.

Writing process - consists of five stages: prewriting, writing drafts, revision, editing, and publication. not set in stone.

Zeguma - a particular breech of sense in a sentence. It occurs when a word is used with two adjacent words in the same construction but only makes literal sense with one of them e.g. "She carried an old tapestry bag and a walk that revealed a long history of injury".