How texts create meaning: style, structure, technique practice questions.

When a character says the opposite of what they mean, usually for mockery or humour, this is:

• Situational irony
• Dramatic irony
• Verbal irony
• Cosmic irony

Answer: Verbal irony

Verbal irony lives in the speaker's words (sarcasm is one aggressive form). Situational and dramatic irony live in events and knowledge gaps, not in wording.

When the audience knows something a character does not, the irony is:

• Verbal irony
• Situational irony
• Dramatic irony
• Structural irony

Answer: Dramatic irony

Dramatic irony depends on a knowledge gap between audience and character, building tension or pathos (e.g. we know Juliet has only taken a sleeping potion, but Romeo believes she is dead). Verbal irony, by contrast, lies in what a speaker says.

TONE and MOOD differ in that:

• Tone is the writer's attitude; mood is the feeling created in the reader
• They are identical terms
• Tone is only found in poetry; mood only in prose
• Mood is the writer's attitude to the subject; tone is the reader's own feeling

Answer: Tone is the writer's attitude; mood is the feeling created in the reader

Tone comes FROM the author/speaker (attitude); mood is the atmosphere the reader FEELS. Ask 'whose feeling?' to tell them apart.

PATHETIC FALLACY is:

• A logical error in an argument
• Giving human emotion to nature or weather to mirror mood
• An appeal to the audience's pity or emotion in a rhetorical argument
• A false or misleading statement

Answer: Giving human emotion to nature or weather to mirror mood

Pathetic fallacy projects human feeling onto the environment, usually to reflect a character's emotions. It is a specialised subset of personification tied to nature and mood.

FORESHADOWING is a technique that:

• Interrupts the story to narrate an earlier, past event
• Hints at events to come later in the narrative
• Reveals the narrator is untrustworthy
• Addresses the reader directly

Answer: Hints at events to come later in the narrative

Foreshadowing plants subtle clues that prepare the reader for later developments, building suspense or inevitability. It points forward, unlike a flashback which looks back.

CHIASMUS is a device in which:

• A list omits its conjunctions
• The grammatical structure of one phrase is reversed in the next
• A single word governs two others, each in an entirely different sense
• A vowel sound is repeated

Answer: The grammatical structure of one phrase is reversed in the next

Chiasmus mirrors word order in an A-B-B-A pattern ('Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country'). Look for the crossed, reversed structure.