Rhetorical Devices for English Language and Composition
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| Abstract | describes qualities that cannot be perceived with the five senses
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| Ad hominem | appealing to one's prejudices, emotions, or special interests rather than to one's intellect or reason; attacking an opponent's character rather than answering his argument
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| Allegory | any writing in verse or prose that has a double meaning
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| Alliteration | Repeating a consonant sound in close proximity to others, or beginning several words with the same vowel sound
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| Allusion | A casual reference in literature to a person, place, event, or another passage of literature, often without explicit identification
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| Analogy | The modification of grammatical usage from the desire for uniformity; a similarity between like features of two things, on which a comparison may be based
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| Anecdote | A short narrative account of an amusing, unusual, revealing, or interesting event
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| Antecedent | preceding; prior; a preceding circumstance, event, object, style, phenomenon, etc.
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| Antithesis | Using opposite phrases in close conjunction
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| Aphorism | Brief, memorable saying that expresses basic truth
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| Archaism | A word, expression, spelling, or phrase that is out of date in the common speech of an era, but still deliberately used by a writer, poet, or playwright for artistic purposes
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| Argument | A statement of a poem's major point--usually appearing in the introduction of the poem
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| Attitude | manner, disposition, feeling, position, etc., with regard to a person or thing; tendency or orientation, esp. of the mind
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| Balance | a state of equilibrium or equipoise; equal distribution of weight, amount, etc. something used to produce equilibrium; counterpoise
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| Band wagon | when people often do and believe things because many other people do and believe the same things
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| Burlesque | A work that ridicules a topic by treating something exalted as if it were trivial or vice-versa (parody)
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| Cacophony | The term in poetry refers to the use of words that combine sharp, harsh, hissing, or unmelodious sounds (opposite of euphony)
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| Canon | A fundamental principle or general rule ; an approved or traditional collection of works ; considered standard or traditionally included in the classroom and published textbooks; writings of an author that generally are accepted as genuine
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| Character Static | a literary character that remains basically unchanged throughout a work
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| Character Active | a character who changes significantly during the course of the story
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| Climax | the moment in a play, novel, short story, or narrative poem at which the crisis reaches its point of greatest intensity and is thereafter resolved; It is also the peak of emotional response from a reader or spectator and usually the turning point in the
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| Coloquial | of or used in everyday informal, especially spoken, language
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| Comic relief | A humorous scene, incident, character, or bit of dialogue occurring after some serious or tragic moment
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| Coming-of-Age story | A novel in which an adolescent protagonist comes to adulthood by a process of experience and disillusionment
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| Conceit | An elaborate or unusual comparison--especially one using unlikely metaphors, simile, hyperbole, and contradiction
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| Concrete detail | describes qualities that can be perceived with the five senses as opposed to using abstract or generalized language
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| Conflict | The opposition between two characters (such as a protagonist and an antagonist), between two large groups of people, or between the protagonist and a larger problem such as forces of nature, ideas, public mores, and so on; Conflict may also be completely
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| Connotation | The extra tinge or taint of meaning each word carries beyond the minimal, strict definition found in a dictionary
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| Deduction | The process of logic in which a thinker takes a rule for a large, general category and assumes that specific individual examples fitting within that general category obey the same rule
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| Denotation | The minimal, strict definition of a word as found in a dictionary, disregarding any historical or emotional connotation; dictionary definition
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| Descriptive detail | an individual or minute part; an item or particular
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| Dialect | The language of a particular district, class, or group of persons
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| Diction | The choice of a particular word as opposed to others
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| Didactic- | Writing that is "preachy" or seeks overtly to convince a reader of a particular point or lesson
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| Ellipsis | In its oldest sense as a rhetorical device, ellipsis refers to the artful omission of a word implied by a previous clause; in its more modern sense, ellipsis refers to a punctuation mark indicated by three periods to indicate material missing from a quot
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| Epigraph | an inscription, esp. on a building, statue, or the like; an apposite quotation at the beginning of a book, chapter, etc.
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| Ethos | the moral element in dramatic literature that determines a character's action rather than his or her thought or emotion
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| Euphemism | Using a mild or gentle phrase instead of a blunt, embarrassing, or painful one
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| Euphony | Attempting to group words together harmoniously, so that the consonants permit an easy and pleasing flow of sound when spoken
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| Exposition | The use of authorial discussion to explain or summarize background material rather than revealing this information through gradual narrative detail
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| Extended metaphor | a metaphor that continues into the sentences that follow; a metaphor developed at great length, occurring frequently in or throughout a work
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| Figurative language | A deviation from what speakers of a language understand as the ordinary or standard use of words in order to achieve some special meaning or effect
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| Figure of speech | A scheme or a trope used for rhetorical or artistic effect
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| Flashback | A method of narration in which present action is temporarily interrupted so that the reader can witness past events; allows an author to fill in the reader about a place or a character, or it can be used to delay important details until just before a dram
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| Foreshadowing | Suggesting, hinting, indicating, or showing what will occur later in a narrative. Foreshadowing often provides hints about what will happen next
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| Form | The "shape" or organizational mode of a particular poem
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| Generic conventions | A feature that has become traditional or expected within a specific genre; the features shown by texts that allow them to be put into a specific genre
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| Genre | A type or category of literature or film marked by certain shared features or conventions
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| Homily | A sermon, or a short, exhortatory work to be read before a group of listeners in order to instruct them spiritually or morally
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| Hyperbole | the trope of exaggeration or overstatement
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| Imagery | A common term of variable meaning, imagery includes the "mental pictures" that readers experience with a passage of literature
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| Induction | The logical assumption or process of assuming that what is true for a single specimen or example is also true for other specimens or examples of the same type
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| Inference | the process of deriving the strict logical consequences of assumed premises; the process of arriving at some conclusion that, though it is not logically derivable from the assumed premises, possesses some degree of probability relative to the premises
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| Invective | Speech or writing that attacks, insults, or denounces a person, topic, or institution, usually involving negative emotional language
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| Irony/Ironic verbal | is a trope in which a speaker makes a statement in which its actual meaning differs sharply from the meaning that the words ostensibly express
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| Irony/Ironic situational | is a trope in which accidental events occur that seem oddly appropriate, such as the poetic justice of a pickpocket getting his own pocket picked
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| Irony/Ironic dramatic | involves a situation in a narrative in which the reader knows something about present or future circumstances that the character does not know
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| Language | A particular system of signs used by members of a group to communicate with each other
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| Logic | a particular method of reasoning or argumentation
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| Logical fallacy | a flaw in the structure of a deductive argument which renders the argument invalid
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| Logos | the rational principle that governs and develops the universe
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| Loose sentence | a type of sentence in which the main idea (independent clause) comes first, followed by dependent grammatical units such as phrases and clauses
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| Metaphor | A comparison or analogy stated in such a way as to imply that one object is another one, figuratively speaking
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| Metonymy | Using a vaguely suggestive, physical object to embody a more general idea
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| Monologue | An interior monologue does not necessarily represent spoken words, but rather the internal or emotional thoughts or feelings of an individual
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| Mood | In literature, a feeling, emotional state, or disposition of mind--especially the predominating atmosphere or tone of a literary work
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| Motif | A conspicuous recurring element, such as a type of incident, a device, a reference, or verbal formula, which appears frequently in works of literature
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| Narrative | whether in prose or verse, involving events, characters, and what the characters say and do
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| Narrator | The "voice" that speaks or tells a story. Some stories are written in a first-person point of view, in which the narrator's voice is that of the point-of-view character
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| Onomatopoeia | The use of sounds that are similar to the noise they represent for a rhetorical or artistic effect
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| Oxymoron | Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level
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| Pacing | a rate of movement, esp. in stepping, walking, etc.; in writing literature could be “described as the manipulation of time”- Gerry Visco
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| Parable | A story or short narrative designed to reveal allegorically some religious principle, moral lesson, psychological reality, or general truth
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| Parody | Comical piece of writing that mocks the characteristics of a specific literary form
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| Paradox | Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level
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| Parallelism | a balance of two or more similar words, phrases, or clauses; using the same pattern of words to show that two or more ideas have the same level of importance
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| Parenthesis | either or both of a pair of signs ( ) used in writing to mark off an interjected explanatory or qualifying remark, to indicate separate groupings of symbols in mathematics and symbolic logic, etc.
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| Parable | A story or short narrative designed to reveal allegorically some religious principle, moral lesson, psychological reality, or general truth
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| Parody | A parody imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work in order to make fun of those same features
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| Pathos | In its rhetorical sense, pathos is a writer or speaker's attempt to inspire an emotional reaction in an audience--usually a deep feeling of suffering, but sometimes joy, pride, anger, humor, patriotism, or any of a dozen other emotions
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| Pedantic | ostentatious in one's learning; overly concerned with minute details or formalisms, esp. in teaching
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| Periodic sentence | A long sentence that is not grammatically complete (and hence not intelligible to the reader) until the reader reaches the final portion of the sentence
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| Personification | A trope in which abstractions, animals, ideas, and inanimate objects are given human character, traits, abilities, or reactions
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| Persuasion | writing or speech that attempts to convince the reader to adopt a particular opinion or course of action
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| Persuasive devices | persuasion that effects pathos, logos, and ethos
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| Plot | A specific piece of drama, usually enacted on a stage by diverse actors who often wear makeup or costumes to make them resemble the character they portray
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| Point of view first-person narrator | the narrator speaks as "I" and the narrator is a character in the story who may or may not influence events within it
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| Point of view third-person narrator | the narrator seems to be someone standing outside the story who refers to all the characters by name or as he, she, they, and so on
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| Point of view omniscient | a narrator who knows everything that needs to be known about the agents and events in the story, and is free to move at will in time and place, and who has privileged access to a character's thoughts, feelings, and motives.
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| Point of view limited omniscient | A narrator who is confined to what is experienced, thought, or felt by a single character, or at most a limited number of characters
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| Prose | Any material that is not written in a regular meter like poetry
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| Pun | A play on two words similar in sound but different in meaning
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| Repetition | Use of any element of language-sound, word, phrase, clause, or sentence-more than once
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| Rhetoric | The art of persuasive argument through writing or speech--the art of eloquence and charismatic language
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| Rhetorical modes exposition | to explain and analyze information by presenting an idea, relevant evidence, and appropriate discussion
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| Rhetorical modes argumentation | to prove the validity of an idea, or point of view, by presenting sound reasoning, discussion, and argument that thoroughly convince the reader
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| Rhetorical modes description | to re-create, invent, or visually present a person, place, event, or action so that the reader can picture that which is being described
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| Rhetorical modes narration | to tell a story or narrate an event or series of events
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| Rhetorical Questions | a figure of speech in the form of a question posed for its persuasive effect without the expectation of a reply
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| Sarcasm | Another term for verbal irony--the act of ostensibly saying one thing but meaning another
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| Satire | An attack on or criticism of any stupidity or vice in the form of scathing humor, or a critique of what the author sees as dangerous religious, political, moral, or social standards
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| Setting | The general locale, historical time, and social circumstances in which the action of a fictional or dramatic work occurs; the setting of an episode or scene within a work is the particular physical location in which it takes place
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| Simile | An analogy or comparison implied by using an adverb such as like or as, in contrast with a metaphor which figuratively makes the comparison by stating outright that one thing is another thing
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| Speech | the faculty or power of speaking; oral communication; ability to express one's thoughts and emotions by speech sounds and gesture
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| Stanza | An arrangement of lines of verse in a pattern usually repeated throughout the poem
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| Structure | anything composed of parts arranged together in some way; an organization
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| Style | The author's words and the characteristic way that writer uses language to achieve certain effects
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| Synecdoche | A rhetorical trope involving a part of an object representing the whole, or the whole of an object representing a part
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| Syntax | the orderly arrangement of words into sentences to express ideas; he standard word order and sentence structure of a language, as opposed to diction (the actual choice of words) or content (the meaning of individual words)
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| Tautology | needless repetition of an idea, esp. in words other than those of the immediate context, without imparting additional force or clearness
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| Theme | A central idea or statement that unifies and controls an entire literary work
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| Thesis | In an essay, a thesis is an argument, either overt or implicit, that a writer develops and supports
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| Tone | The means of creating a relationship or conveying an attitude or mood; the writer’s attitude toward his or her audience and subject in a literary work
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| Transition | movement, passage, or change from one position, state, stage, subject, concept, etc., to another; change; can connect paragraphs and turn disconnected writing into a unified whole
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| Understatement | The opposite of exaggeration
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| Voice | the sound or sounds uttered through the mouth of living creatures, esp. of human beings in speaking, shouting, singing, etc.
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| Wit | In modern vernacular, the word wit refers to elements in a literary work designed to make the audience laugh or feel amused; In seventeenth-century usage, the term wit much more broadly denotes originality, ingenuity, and mental acuity--especially in the
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| Zeugma | Artfully using a single verb to refer to two different objects grammatically, or artfully using an adjective to refer to two separate nouns, even though the adjective would logically only be appropriate for one of the two
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