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ALL rhet terms
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Attitude | The underlying feeling behind a tone. The author's attitude closely linked with the tone of a piece. |
| Abstract | Something not concrete, like love or feminism. Difficult to understand; impersonal; theoretical |
| Allegory | The device of using character and/or story elements symbolically to represent an abstraction in addition to the literal meaning. In some ___________, for example an author may intend the characters to personify an abstraction like hope or freedom. |
| Alliteration | The repetition of sounds, especially initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words (as in "she sells sea shells") |
| Allusion | A direct or indirect reference to something which is presumably commonly known, as an event, book, myth, place, or work of art |
| Analogy | A similarity or comparison between two different things or the relationship between them...can explain something unfamiliar by associating it with or pointing out its similarity to something more familair |
| Anaphora | Repetition of a word or words at the beginning of two or more lines, clauses, or sentences. The repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clause. Example is "As I _____, As I ______, As I ______" |
| Anastrophe | Inversion of the natural or usual word order. Example is Yoda when he speaks and says "Ready are you? What know you of ready?" |
| Antecedent | the word, phrase, or clause to which a pronoun refers |
| Anticipating Audience Response | Answering the oppositions to an argument before they have been raised. The rhetorical technique of anticipating counterarguments and offering a refutation |
| Antithesis | Two opposing ideas stated through similar grammatical structure: "Man proposes, God disposes" |
| Aphorism | A terse statement of known authorship which expresses a general truth or a moral principle... sometimes like a proverb, sometimes a memorable summation of the author's point. |
| Apostrophe | A figure of speech that directly addresses an absent or imaginary person or a personified abstraction, such as liberty or love. |
| Appositive Phrase | A noun phrase that gives specific information defining a noun or pronoun, renames or adds information or details to it. Example is "a careful reader" or "outspoken critic" |
| Call to Action | Writing that urges people to take action or promote change. |
| Characterization | Describing a character's actions, appearance, thoughts, and feelings. |
| Chiasmus | A statement consisting of two parallel parts in which the second part is structurally reversed. Examples are "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" |
| Classification and Division | Sorting, grouping, or collecting things by shared category; breaking things down into non-overlapping categories |
| Cliché | A worn-out idea or overused expression such as "think outside the box" or "plenty of fish in the sea" or "hungry as a horse". |
| Colloquial Expression | The use of slang or informalities in speech or writing. Not generally acceptable for formal writing, writing that sounds like talk. |
| Compare/Contrast | Interweaving points about two things to discuss similarities and differences. |
| Compound/Complex Sentences | A sentence that contains two or more independent clauses and at least one subordinate clause. |
| Conceit | A fanciful expression, usually in the form of an extended metaphor or surprising analogy between seemingly dissimilar objects...displays intellectual cleverness as a result of the unusual comparison being made |
| Concrete | An actual thing, instance, or experience. existing in a material or physical form; real or solid; not abstract. |
| Defensive/Offensive | An argument in which the speaker defends his own views and attacks the views of others. A method of argumentation in which the speaker or writer defends her own views and/or attacks the views of others |
| Definition | Specifying the basic nature of a thing. The basic nature of any phenomenon, idea, or things. Dictionaries place the subject to be defined in the context of the general class to which it belongs. |
| Connotation | The non-literal, associative meaning of a word; the implied, suggested meaning |
| Denotation | The exact meaning of a word, independent of its emotional coloration |
| Denotation and Connotation | denotation is the specific, exact meaning of a word, independent of its emotional coloration or associations. Connotation is the emotional implications that words may carry, as distinguished from their denotative meanings. |
| Diction | the choice and use of words and phrases in speech or writing. |
| Doublespeak | language used to distort and manipulate rather than to communicate |
| Downplaying/Intensifying | methods of drawing attention and diversion to the work's effectiveness |
| Ellipsis | the omission of a word or phrase which is grammatically necessary but can be deduced from the context |
| Emotional Appeal (Pathos) | the exploitation of an audience's feelings of pity or fear to make a case. |
| Ethical Appeal (Ethos) | an appeal to the audience to respect the authority and credibility of the speaker |
| Ethnocentricity | the belief in the inherent superiority of one's own group and culture |
| Euphemism | The substitutions of an inoffensive, indirect, or agreeable expression for a word or phrase perceived as socially unacceptable for example, "disadvantaged" for poor. |
| Exposition | To explain or inform by process analysis, definition, classification and division, comparison and contrast, or cause-and-effect analysis. |
| Figurative Language | The use of words outside the literal or usual meanings to create effective images. |
| Hyperbole | Conscious exaggeration without the intent of literal persuasion. |
| Imagery | The use of language to convey sensory experience. |
| Idiom | An expression that cannot be translated literally; Rub someone the wrong way. |
| Irony | To express a meaning opposite to the intended meaning. |
| Jargon | Words used between people in the same field. |
| Juxtapose | Considering two ideas side by side or close together even if the ideas are completely different. |
| Lending Credence | Giving credit for the opponent's ideas. |
| Litotes | When a thing is affirmed by stating the negative of its opposite. To say "She was not unmindful" when one means that "She gave careful attention". |
| Logical Fallacies | Pseudo-reasoning that may occur accidentally or may be intentionally contrived to len plausibility to an unsound argument. |
| Logical Reasoning | The idea that there are principles governing correct or reliable inferences. |
| Loose Sentence | A sentence that is grammatically complete at some point before the end. |
| Lyrical Drama | A dramatic poem in which the form of drama is used to express lyric themes instead of relying on a story as the bases of the action. |
| Metaphor | A figure of speech involving an implied comparison. For example: "She is a rose!" |
| Metonymy | A figurative of speech characterized by the substitution of a term naming an object closely associated with the word in mind for the word itself. |
| Mood | The overall atmosphere of a work. |
| Motif | Recurrent images, words, objects, phrases, or actions that tend to unify the work. |
| Narration | The story of events and/or experiences that tell what happened. |
| Onomatopoeia | The use of words that by their sound suggest their meaning. |
| Oxymoron | A self-contradictory combination of words. |
| Paradox | A phrase or statement that while seemly is contradictory or absurd may actually be well-founded or true. |
| Parallelism | The arrangement of parts of a sentence, sentences, paragraphs, and larger units of composition that one element of with another is similarly developed and phrased. |
| Periodic Sentence | A sentence that is not grammatically correct before its end. |
| Personification | Attributing human characteristics to nonhuman things. |
| Point of View | A term used in ANALYSIS and CRITICISM for fiction to describe the way in which the reader is presented with the materials of the STORY or, regarded from another angle, the vantage point from which the author presents the ACTIONS of the STORY. |
| Polysyndeton | Is the repetition of conjunctions in close succession for rhetorical effect: "Here and there and everywhere." |
| Process Analysis | A method of clarifying the nature of something by explaining how it works in separate, easy-to-understand steps |
| Repetition | Reiterating a word or phrase, or rewording the same idea, to secure emphasis. |
| Rhetorical Question | Asked solely to produce an effect and not to elicit a reply, such as "When will genetic engineering fulfill its promise?" |
| Rhetorical Strategies | The efforts made by authors to persuade or inform readers. Different things employed by writers that describe the different ways to persuade the reader. |
| Satire | A technique that ridicules both people and societal institutions, using humor and exaggeration. |
| Simile | A figurative of speech involving a comparison using like or as. |
| Simple Sentence | A complete sentence that is neither compound nor complex. |
| Spin | In politics, harmful situations are sometimes presented in the media as more benign. |
| Style | The author's characteristic manner of expression and distinctive features of tone, imagery, figurative language, sound, and rhythm. |
| Syllogism | A formula for presenting an argument logically. |
| Symbol | Something concrete that stands for something abstract. |
| Synecdoche | A type of figurative language in which the whole is used for the part of the part used for the whole- the use of "Wall Street" to refer the money market. |
| Syntax | The pattern or structure of the word order in a sentence or phrase: the study of grammatical structure. |
| Tone | The voice the writer has chosen to adopt for readers. Produced by the combined effect of word choice, sentence structure, and purpose, and reflects the writer's attitude toward the subject. |
| Voice | The implied personality the author chooses to adopt. In fiction, this may reflect a persona who projects views quite different from the author's. |
| Verisimilitude | The quality of approximating life and reality. |
| A Shift in Definition | Changing the assumed meaning(s) of terms in mid-conversation, or playing off multiple denotations/connotations of words to distort, confuse, or manipulate. |
| Ad Hominem Argument | An attack against the character of the person instead of the issue. Example: "He's a ______ (horrible person, foreigner, drop out, loser, etc.), and so his ideas on ________ (healthcare, politics, military action) can't be right." |
| Bandwagon Appeal | Everyone is doing it, so you're not one of us if you don't do it too. (The source of peer pressure.) |
| Begging the Question | Circular reasoning in which an unproved conclusion is assumed to be true. |
| False Analogy | An argument based on misleading, superficial, or implausible comparisons. Ex. "Thinking about cheating is the same thing as actually cheating." |
| Non Sequitur | "It does not follow;" where the conclusion does not follow the reasoning which led to it. |
| Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. | Assuming that one thing is caused by another simply because it follows it. Often the source of superstitions. |
| Red Herring | Use of an irrelevant point to divert attention from the real issue. "How could that woman be guilty of fraud? Her hair looks awful." |
| Slippery Slope | "Repeal of t-shirt dress codes will lead to anarchy in the streets!" A failure to provide evidence showing that one event will lead to a chain of events of a catastrophic nature. |
| Straw Man | When a opponent takes original argument of his adversary and then offers a close imitation of it defeats it. "President Jones pardoned the protesting nun, so he must be soft on crime and will forgive all the terrorists." |
| Propaganda | Information, usually exaggerated and containing graphic images, used to spread an ideology, especially advocating religious or political causes, Governments in wartime |
| Antimetabole | The repetition of words in successive clauses in transposed grammatical order. |
| Apophasis | To mention without mentioning. |
| Parallipsis | A rhetorical device wherein the speaker or writer invokes a subject by denying that it should be invoked. For instance, "I don't even want to talk about the allegations that my opponent is a drunk." |
| Prolepsis | An extreme kind of paralipsis that gives the full details of the acts one is claiming to pass over. |
| Bicolon, tricolon, or tetracolon | A sentence with two, three, or four clearly defined parts. Examples: Caesar's veni, vedi, vici; "That nation of the people, by the people, for the people." Lincoln |
| Epanalepsis | A figure of speech defined by the repetition of the initial word (or words) of a clause or sentence at the end of that same clause or sentence. "Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!" |
| Epistrophe | A figure of speech and the counterpart of anaphora. It is the repetition of the same word or words at the end of successive phrases, clauses or sentences. |
| Hyperbaton | A figure of speech in which words that naturally belong together are separated from each other or emphasis or effect. "The helmsman steered, the ship moved on; / Yet never a breeze up blew" - Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
| PELIDS | Pathos, Ethos, Logos, Inductive, Deductive, Syllogism |
| SOLIDD | Syntax, Organization, Levels of discourse, Imagery, Diction, Details |
| DIDLS | Diction, Images, Details, Language, Sentence structure |
| SOAPSTone | Speaker, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, Subject, Tone |
Created by:
MeganS.
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