USE OF ITALICS IN LITERATURE ESSAY

It is a convention, when writing about literature, to use italics for the titles of whole works. The titles of chapters, sections or individual poems are enclosed in double inverted commas.
In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, one of the most popular is "The Wife of Bath's Tale."

If you are handwriting an essay, use underlining to represent italics.

ANACOLUTHON

This term is used when the speaker ends a sentence with a different grammatical construction from the one at the start. It is obviously common in everyday chat but is also a rhetorical device to indicate, usually, high emotion as when King Lear says:
     I will have such revenges on you both
     That all the world shall - I will do such things,
     What they are, yet I know not ... (Act II scene iv lines 277-279)
The dash in this Arden edition indicates the break in syntax.

C and G

The consonants c and g make a soft sound (s and j) when they are followed by e, i or y.
Remember these phrases: city centre cyclist; gentle giant in the gym.
This rule becomes important when suffixing because you need to make sure that you keep the c or g soft by keeping the e: manageable, noticeable. You can drop the e when an i does the work: managing, noticing.

Some words have a u to stop the e making the g soft: guest, league.
Some words with a sh sound change the e to i: vicious.

SYMPATHETIC: two uses of the word

We normally use this word to mean that someone is kindly and understanding towards another person: Mrs Jennings is sympathetic towards Marianne in Sense and Sensibility.
We could also write: Mrs Jennings is a sympathetic character. This would mean that we, as readers, sympathise with her, warm to her and like her.

For more on this character and novel, see my website: Classics of English Literature: essays by Barbara Daniels

PARAPHRASE

This word means an attempt to rephrase a poem or piece of prose in your own words without shortening it. If it is reduced in the number of words it is called a precis (with an acute accent on the e.)

MINUSCULE

Note the spelling of this word (often used colloquially) which means extremely small: minuscule with a u in the middle.
A good way to remember is to see the word minus at the beginning..

METONYMY

Metonymy is device by which the attributes of an item connected to a person are transferred to that person. It has become popular recently in critical terminology and seems to have moved away from its earlier more limited use whereby the crown refers to the King or Queen more like a simple emblem.
An example would be that in Chapter 24 of Jane Austen's Emma when Frank Churchill is buying "sleek, well-tied parcels" of gloves and we feel that he is also smooth and covering something up.
See my analysis on my website Classics of English Literature: essays by Barbara Daniels