The Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms

We're excited to have this series selected as an "Online Resource Recommended by AP English Teachers" on the College Board website!

In the Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms, our professors define common literary devices and offer short lessons on how to use them in essays and other forms of literary criticism. The series is designed to be a free, online, creative commons (CC BY) resource for high school and college English teachers and students, offering them tools to engage meaningfully with challenging literary texts. To see the videos, please click on the links below.

To support dual language instruction, we are beginning to add Spanish as well as English subtitles to our videos. If you would like to read the English or Spanish transcripts of our videos, please click on their titles and you will be directed to pages dedicated to each term.

Interested in learning some English grammar? Check out our new Oregon State Guide to Grammar Series!

Interested in learning more about our programs? Check out our undergraduate degrees in English Literature and Creative Writing.

Stay healthy, everybody!

"What is a Prologue?" (Spanish Subtitles Available)

"What is a Prologue?": An Introduction to the Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms

Alphabetical List of Literary Terms

We are hard at work producing more videos on subjects such as soliloquy, nonfiction, and parody, and we will be publishing them throughout the 2021-22 academic year, so please subscribe to our YouTube channel to keep up with the series.

If you are an English teacher, we'd love to get your suggestions for other subjects that might be suitable for our series. Please post a comment on one of our videos or our YouTube main page with your recommendations.

Interested in helping us keep the series going? Your tax-deductible gift would support the development of new videos and translation of pre-existent videos into Spanish. If you would like to make a donation online, please click on "Support SWLF" image above.