rhetorical devices

rhetorical devices

* figures of speech used to enhance sound, memory, and understanding

ethos

* persuading the audience to trust experts
* well-known people
* believable - **eth**ical

logos

* convincing using facts and evidence
* **log**ical - makes sense
* charts, diagrams, statistics, percentages

pathos

* grabbing your attention with feelings
* joy, sadness, excitement, nervousness, fear
* sym**path**y - em**path**y

rhetorical question

* makes people think and pay attention - used for effect
* change or solidify someone’s opinion

alliteration

* at least 2 words
* repeating first sound
* ex: peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers

allusion

* reference to someone famous in literature, history, or in today’s world
* big 3 usually are the bible, shakespeare, and mythology

foreshadowing

* hint at something in the future - or what’s going to come next

hyperbole

* extreme exaggeration

metaphor

* comparison of 2 unlike things **without** using like or as

onomatopoeia

* noise or sound word

personification

* giving human qualities to an animal or anything not human

simile

* comparison of two unlike things using like or as

parallelism

* two or more parts of a sentence use a similar form to give the passage pattern
* ex: wounds caused by knives will heal, wounds caused by words will not heal

antithesis

* the use of two opposites in a sentence for contrasting effect
* ex: when they go low, we go high

anaphora

* the repeating of a word or phrase at the beginning of the sentence
* ex: i have a dream

epistrophe

* the repeating of a word or phrase at the end of the sentence
* ex: a government of the people, by the people, for the people

symploce

* two or more repeating phrases at the beginning of the sentence and one at the end
* ex: you want me on that wall, you need me on the wall

diacope

* using repetition with one or two words in between to break it up
* ex: the horror! oh, the horror!

progressio

* several antithesis in succession (one after the next after the next)
* ex: i say yes, you say no, i say stop, you say go

chiasmus

* refers to a grammatical structure that inverts a previous phrase
* you say one thing, and then you say something very similar, but flipped around
* ex: we shape our buildings, and afterward our buildings shape us

anadiplosis

* where you use the last word or phrase of one clause as the first word or phrase of the next
* ex: fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate