Rhetorical devices and figures of speech
Terms
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- Alliteration
- repition of the initial consonents of words in a phrase, e.g. "dime a dozen"
- Allusion
- reference to something real or ficticious, e.g. "apple of knowledge"
- Analogy
- comparison of a two pairs with the same relationship, an extended metaphor, e.g. "hot is to cold as fire is to ice"
- Antithesis
- opposition, or contrast of ideas or words in a balanced or parallel construction, e.g. "Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more." Brutus, Julius Caesar
- Apostrophe
- a sudden turn from the general audience to address a specific group or person or personified abstraction absent or present, e.g. when Tim sees Dan's room "Dan, look what you've down!"
- Bathos
- writing that strives to be serious (impassioned or elevated) but achieves only a comic effect because it is anti-climactic, e.g. "Your eyes spit fire, your cheeks grow red as beef" Tom Thumb the Great - Fielding
- Epithet
- an adjective or adjectival phrase of common knowledge describing a characteristic quality of a person or thing, e.g."Alexander the Great"
- Hyperbole
- figurative language which greatly overstates or exaggerates facts, whether in earnest or for comic effect, e.g."My parents are going to kill me!"
- Juxtaposition
- the positioning of ideas or images side by side for emphasis or to show contrast, e.g."Romeo and Juliet's love is juxtaposed with their families' hatred"
- Metaphor
- a figure of speech wherein a comparison is made between two unlike quantities withour the use of words "like" and "as",e.g. "the black clouds of God's wrath" Jonathan Edwards
- Metonymy
- substituting a word naming an object for another word closely associated with it,e.g."Pay tribute to the crown" or "fifty head" represents the herd
- Synecdoche
- a figure of speech in which a part of something stands for the whole or whole for part, e.g."wheels for automobiles"
- Onomatopoeia
- use of a word to represent or to imitate natural sounds, e.g."bam!"
- Oxymoron
- technique used to produce an effect by a seeming self-contradiction, e.g."jumbo shrimp"
- Parallelism
- the repition of syntactical similarities in passages closely connected for rhetorical effect. The repetitive structure lends wit or emphasis to the meanings of the separate clauses, thus being particularly effective in antithesis, e.g. "a boy from the city, a girl from the country" MLK
- Parenthesis
- a construction (word,phrase,another sentence) that is placed as an unexpected aside in the middle of the rest of the sentence, e.g. in definition
- Personification
- human attributes to objects or animals, e.g. "the candle light danced"
- Rhetorical Question
- a question solely for effect, with no answer expected, e.g."Are you stupid?"
- Simile
- a comparison between two unlike quantities which uses the word "like" or "as", e.g. "clear as crystal"
- Understatement
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Litotes-understatement used deliberately, e.g."it isn't very serious. I have this tiny little tumor on the brain." J.D. Salinger
Meiosis-reference to something with a name disproportionately lesser than its nature (a kind of litotes), e.g. "the (scratch) my client gave to the plaintiff" (when referring to a sizable wound)