Rhetorical Strategies and Terms

Alliteration

Repetition of the same sound beginning several words in sequence.

Analogy

A kind of extended metaphor or long simile making explicit comparisons between two events, ideas, or people.

Anaphora

Repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or lines.

Antithesis

Opposition or contrast of ideas or words in a balanced or parallel construction.

Apostrophe

Turning away from the audience to address someone not present.

Assonance

Repetition of different words with the same vowel sounds.

Asyndeton

Omission of normally occurring conjunctions between coordinate phrases, clauses, or words.

Cumulative sentence

Sentence that begins with an independent clause and finishes with a series of dependent clauses.

Climax

Words or phrases arranged by degrees of increasing significance.

Chiasmus

Grammatical structure where the first clause is reversed in the second.

Euphemism

Transforming an unpleasant expression into more socially acceptable terms.

Hyperbole

Deliberate exaggeration to emphasize a point.

Inversion

Inverted order of words in a sentence.

Irony

Taking on another voice that states the opposite of what is expressed.

Litotes (Understatement)

Intensification of an idea by understating it.

Metaphor

A comparison made by speaking of one thing in terms of another.

Metonymy

Substituting the name of one thing for another to which it is closely related.

Oxymoron

Figure that binds together contradictory words.

Paradox

An apparent contradiction that evokes some measure of truth.

Parallelism

A similarity in the syntactical structure of a set of words in successive phrases or clauses.

Periodic Sentence

Sentence whose main clauses are withheld until the end.

Personification

Representation of abstractions or inanimate objects with human qualities.

Polysyndeton

Intentional employment of a series of conjunctions not normally found in successive clauses.

Pun

A play on the meaning of words by using words that sound alike or have different meanings.

Rhetorical Question

A question asked not for further discussion, but to assert or deny an answer implicitly.

Simile

A comparison between two things explicitly using 'like' or 'as'.

Synecdoche

A word standing for a part of something used for the whole of that thing or vice versa.

Zeugma

Using two different words in a grammatically similar way but producing different meanings.