- Rhetoric essentially means the art of speaking persuasively.
- It is the use of language in a formalized way in order to convince or have an effect on an audience.
A) Word order
- Manipulation of common word order to create an effect
B) Word choice
- Figurative language (oxymoron, onomatopoeia, assonance, alliteration, hyperbole, understatement, irony, allusion, litotes, pun)
- Jargon, slang, dialect, colloquial, concrete
- Word complexity and abstraction
Sentence structure
- Sentence type (simple, compound, complex, compound-complex)
- Sentence design (loose, periodic, balanced, allowable fragments)
- Use of semi-colon, appositives, colons, dashes
- Order (natural, inverted, split)
- Type (assertive, interrogatory, imperative, exclamatory)
Rhetorical Conventions
- Similarity
- Contrast
- Repetition
- Emphasis
- Addressing the Audience
- Expressing Similarity
- Onomatopoeia – is a word that imitates or suggests the source of the sound that it describes. Ex. Oink, meow
- Allegory – a story with two meanings (literal and symbolic) Ex. if a story uses animals to represent symbolic concepts.
- Personification – a description of an object as being a living person or animal as in: “The sun shone brightly down on me as if she were shining for me alone”.
Contrast
- Oxymoron – is a figure of speech that combines normally-contradictory terms. Ex. failed success, dark sunshine.
- (Antithesis – is direct opposite: the complete or exact opposite of something. Ex. bitter-sweet, ebony, and ivory.)
Repetition
- Alliteration – When two or more words in a poem begin with the same letter or sound. Ex. Dressy Daffodils.
- Consonance – Refers to the repetition of consonant sounds at the end of words in a line, not vowels Ex. Lady Lounges Lazily.
- Assonance – Refers to vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences. Ex. Do you like blue?
Emphasis
- Overstatement – An exaggerated statement. Ex. “I’d give my right arm for a piece of pizza.”
- Understatement – is a form of speech that contains an expression of less strength than would be expected. Ex. “It’s just a flesh wound.”
(Black Knight, after having both arms cut off)
Ways of Addressing the Audience
- Rhetorical question – is a figure of speech in the form of a question posed for its persuasive effect without the expectation of a reply. Ex. “Why me?”
- Apostrophe – directly addressing an absent person, abstract idea, or nonhuman object, often with the exclamation “O” or “Oh“.
