Category
page 1Descriptive technique
anthropomorphism
thumb|Mickey Mouse, an anthropomorphic mouse and an American cartoon character co-created in 1928 by [[Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, showing typical elements of anthropomorphism: bipedalism, human-like hands with opposable thumbs, human facial expressions, and wearing clothing.]]
Anthropomorphism is the ascribing of human personality, appearance, conduct, cognition, or other attributes to non-human entities, often including non-human animals. In fiction and folklore, it is specifically the endowing of non-human characters with human-like behaviors, speech, facial expressions, etc; common examples

simile
thumb|The Madonna album Like a Virgin, in whose title track the narrative persona uses a simile, professing to be experiencing an erotic relationship "like a virgin".
A simile () is a type of figure of speech that directly compares two unrelated things, using wording to explicitly make the comparison (often, with a grammatical structure of the type "x is like y"). It is usually understood specifically to entail figurative comparison: thus "a wolf is like a dog" is merely a literal comparison, whereas the figurative "a man is like a wolf" is a simile. In the words of Michael Israel, Jennifer Ri

cliché
A cliché ( or ; ) is a saying, idea, or element of an artistic work that has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning, novelty, or figurative or artistic power, even to the point of now being bland or uninteresting. In phraseology, the term has taken on a more technical meaning, referring to an expression imposed by conventionalized linguistic usage.
grammatical modifier
optional element in phrase structure or clause structure
diction
Diction ( (nom. ), "a saying, expression, word"), in its original meaning, is a writer's or speaker's distinctive vocabulary choices and style of expression in a piece of writing such as a poem or story. In its common meaning, it is the distinctiveness of speech: the art of speaking so that each word is clearly heard and understood to its fullest complexity and extremity, and concerns pronunciation and tone, rather than word choice and style. This is more precisely and commonly expressed with the term enunciation or with its synonym, articulation.
narration
Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person, or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story to deliver information to the audience, particularly about the plot: the series of events. Narration is a required element of all written stories (novels, short stories, poems, memoirs, etc.), presenting the story in its entirety. It is optional in most other storytelling formats, such as films, plays, television shows and video games, in which the story can be conveyed through other
objectification
In social philosophy, objectification is the act of treating a person as an object or a thing. Sexual objectification, the act of treating a person as a mere object of sexual desire, is a subset of objectification, as is self-objectification, the objectification of one's self. In Marxism, the objectification of social relationships is discussed as "reification".

relevance
Relevance is the connection between topics that makes one useful for dealing with the other. Relevance is studied in many different fields, including cognitive science, logic, and library and information science. Epistemology studies it in general, and different theories of knowledge have different implications for what is considered relevant.
semiotic square
tool used in the structural analysis of the relationships between semiotic signs
encyclopedic novel
literary concept