Short Stories

Unit Review Sheet

Facts and Definitions

Lesson 1: The Gift of the Magi

• Short stories cover the five basic story elements: setting, conflict, theme, character, and plot.
• An allusion is a literary device that involves a reference to a person or thing of historical or literary significance.
• Situational irony is a literary device that involves a contrast between what is expected to happen and what actually occurs.
• Dramatic irony is a literary device where the reader has information that the characters do not have and thus enhances the comedic/tragic effect or tension of the story.
• Annotations are marks made in the text of a story and notes a reader writes in the margins. Making annotations helps ensure a close reading of a text.

Lesson 2: The Necklace

• A narrative's theme is the main subject/idea that can be inferred by the reader or is explicitly stated in a story.
• Since readers may have different cultural values, backgrounds, and concerns, there is sometimes disagreement when identifying the main theme. Textual evidence is used in a literary analysis to provide specific evidence from the story to support your identification of a main idea.
• The present tense, or the narrative present is used when writing about the action in a story.
• An objective summary is a genre of writing in which the writer creates an abbreviated version of a story's plot and discusses its central theme(s).

Lesson 3: Literary Response

• Comparison/contrast papers usually focus more on ways that two things are similar (comparison) or more on ways they are different (contrast).
• When you include a direct quotation from a story in a paper, place a quotation mark at the end of the quotation (with no period), then include the author's last name in parentheses, and finally insert a period. (If the source contains page or line numbers, you would include that information as well.) Your citation should look like this: "Quote" (Author's last name).
• Transitional words and phrases help you move smoothly from one idea to another in a paper.

Lesson 4: Characterization

• Direct characterization is when a character's personality and appearance are clearly revealed by the author specifically telling the reader what the character looks like or is thinking.
• Indirect characterization is when the reader must infer things about the character's personality and appearance based on the individual character's speech and actions or by observing how other characters in the narrative interact with and respond to that character.
• A character's speech, thoughts, appearance, and actions can all contribute to the process of characterization.

Lesson 5: Edgar Allan Poe

• Romanticism was an artistic movement whose artists emphasized the importance of individuality and placed a high value on human emotion as a valid way to experience the world and nature.
• Gothic fiction is a genre of stories that tend to have a gloomy atmosphere and focus on themes of death, decay, and madness. They may also contain elements of the supernatural and feature extreme emotional states.
• Foreshadowing is a device that suggests what might occur later in the story. Foreshadowing is often not recognizable until after a first reading of a text.
• Unreliable narrators are narrators who somehow indicate, by their words or actions, that they cannot be trusted or are trying to purposely deceive the audience.

Lesson 6: The Lottery

• A symbol is a literary device in which an object represents another idea or has a deeper meaning than what it literally is or appears to be.
• Since readers may have different backgrounds and cultural values, not all readers will agree on the meanings of the symbols found in literature. In a literary analysis, you provide specific evidence from the text to support your interpretation of a story's symbol.

Lesson 7: Everyday Use

• Point of view refers to the perspective of the narrator who tells the story. Stories can be told through the eyes of first-person, second-person, or third-person narrators. Third-person narratives can be told through a limited or omniscient point of view.
• With a first-person point of view, the reader experiences or sees the action through the eyes of a character who refers to himself or herself as "I."
• Second-person point of view is a not commonly used perspective where the narrator of the story refers to the reader as "you."
• In third-person point of view, the reader experiences the story through the eyes of someone who exists outside the action of the story and tells the story using third-person pronouns ("he," "she," etc.).
• The two common types of third-person point of view are omniscient and limited.
• An omniscient narrator is "all knowing" and is able to see inside the minds of most (if not all) of the characters and can relate the key events of the story.
• A limited, third-person point of view features a narrator who either relays the thoughts of one main character or tells the story as a detached observer.

Lesson 8: Harrison Bergeron

• A film adaptation is a filmmaker's retelling or interpretation of a written story in movie form.
• Filmmakers who make adaptations of written works must make several key decisions that affect how the audience responds to their version of the story: They must decide if they will stay focused on the main theme of the original story or if they want to heighten and emphasize a less prominent theme, they have to choose which scenes/symbols/characters/etc. from the story to cut or whether they will need to create new ones, and they have to pick which film techniques to use to capture the meaning and spirit of their interpretation of the original story.
• Stories can be told using different mediums (or media). A medium refers to the form and material used. Artists can express themselves using a variety of forms, such as books, film, sculpture, etc.
• A voice-over in a film is when a narrator speaks directly to the viewer over the film's visuals.

Lesson 9: Dialogue

• In dialogue, begin a new paragraph every time you change speakers.
• If a character says more than one sentence in a paragraph, save the closing quotation marks until the end of the last sentence.
• Always place periods and commas inside of closing quotation marks; place semicolons and colons outside.
• Place question marks and exclamation points inside closing quotation marks when they are part of the quotation or piece of dialogue (e.g., the person speaking asks a question). Place them outside of closing quotation marks when they are part of the sentence but not the quotation. (Example: Did he really say, "I hate kittens"?)
• Use single quotation marks when material containing quotation marks is found within other material containing quotation marks. (Example: Chloe said, "My favorite story is 'The Lottery.'")
• Use quotation marks to indicate the title of short stories, short poems, chapter titles, essays, and magazine/newspaper/webpage articles. (Long/epic poems, novels and novellas, story or essay collections, and the names of magazines or newspapers are underlined or italicized.)

Final Project: Writing a Short Story

• Invention strategies are methods or techniques used to generate ideas and writing.
• Freewriting is a prewriting invention strategy to help writers come up with ideas. It involves writing non-stop for a set period of time.
• Brainstorming is a prewriting invention strategy to generate ideas for writing. It involves jotting down your ideas in list or sentence form.