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 - ethical

logos

• convincing using facts and evidence
• logical - makes sense
• charts, diagrams, statistics, percentages

pathos

• grabbing your attention with feelings
• joy, sadness, excitement, nervousness, fear
• sympathy - empathy

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