178. Point of view: the perspective from which a story is presented; common points of view include:
• First person: a narrator referred to as “I,” who is a character in the story and relates the actions through
his or her own perspective
• Third person omniscient: a narrator who is able to see into each character’s mind and understands all the
action
• Third person limited: a narrator who reports the thoughts of only one character and generally only what
that character sees
• Third person objective: a narrator who only reports what would be visible to a camera; thoughts and feelings
are only revealed if a character speaks of them.
179. Polysyndeton: a sentence which uses and or another conjunction to separate the items in a series.
Polysyndeton appear in the form of X and Y and Z, stressing equally each member of a series. It makes the
sentence slower and the items more emphatic than in the asyndeton. It suggests a piling up of detail or creates
a fluid, continuous sentence. Because this device appears a great deal in the Bible, its use can suggest the
solemn, reverential cadences of the holy text.
“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never
perish.” John 10:27
“No sense of direction, though, and the field seemed to sick him under, and everything was black and wet and swirling, and he
couldn’t get his bearings, and then another round hit nearby, and for a few moments all he could do was hold his breath and
duck down beneath the water.”— Tim O’ Brien, The Things They Carried
“He told them too of the sickness of the land, and how the grass had disappeared, and of the dongas that ran from hill to valley,
and valley to hill; how it was a land of old men and women, and mothers and children; how the maize grew barely to the height of
a man; how the tribe was broken, and the house broken, and the man broken; how when they went away, many never came back,
many never wrote any more. How this was true not only in Ndotsheni,m but also in the Lufafa, and the Inhlavini, and the
Umkomaas, and the Umzimkulu.”—Alan Paton, Cry the Beloved Country
180. Position statement: a straight-forward statement or declaration of the author’s position on a particular
topic or topics. Such statements usually are short and concise and do not include background information or
discussion.
181. Predicate: the verb and any of its objects or complements in a clause.
I learned all this later.
The chef is a young man with a broad experience of the world.
The fate of the land parallels the fate of the culture.
182. Premise: a proposition antecedently supposed or proved as a basis of argument or inference; the first two
propositions of a syllogism from which the conclusion is drawn
183. Preposition: a part of speech that introduces a prepositional phrase. The preposition links the complement
in the phrase to some other expression. Common prepositions include: about, above, across, after, against, among,
around, as, at, because of, before, behind, below, beside, between, but, by, despite, down, during, for, from, in, in addition to, in spite
of, inside, into, off, on, out, over, past, since, than, through, till, to, toward, under, until, up, with, and without.
184. Prepositional phrase: see phrase
185. Problem/Solution: an organizational strategy in which the author presents a problem to the reader and
then gives possible solutions to the problem, evaluating each one for its merits or lack thereof.
186. Pronouns: parts of speech that are special types of nouns that take the place of another noun or noun
phrase and refer back to it (known as the antecedent). There are several classes of pronouns, including personal
(I, me, we, us, you, he, him, she, her, it, they, them), possessive (my, mine, our, ours, your, yours, his, her, hers, its,
their, theirs), reflexive (myself, ourselves, yourself, yourselves, himself, herself, itself, themselves), demonstrative
(this, that, these, those), reciprocal (each other, one another), interrogative (who, whom, whose, which, what), relative