Appeals, Rhetorical Devices, and Literary Devices

A complete set of vocabulary flashcards covering literary devices, rhetorical devices, syntax structures, and rhetorical appeals as defined in the lecture notes.

Simile

Comparison using like or as.

Metaphor

Comparison between two objects.

Analogy

Comparison between two things to make a concept easier to understand or put something in a different perspective.

Personification

Giving human-like qualities to an inanimate object.

Pun

A play on two words similar in sound but different in meaning.

Euphemism

A mild word or phrase substituted for a more offensive, unpleasant, or crude one.

Malapropism

Misusing words to create a comic effect or characterize the speaker as being too confused, ignorant, or flustered to use correct diction.

Aphorism

A pithy observation that contains a general truth.

Metonymy

A thing or concept called not by its own name but rather by the name of something that is associated with that thing in meaning or concept.

Synecdoche

When a part of an object represents the whole, or the whole of an object representing a part.

Apostrophe

To address someone who is not there, or to address a personified object.

Allusion

Indirect reference to a well-known person, place, book, or event.

Ellipsis

Omission of a word or short phrase easily understood in context.

Foreshadowing

When the author gives a hint on future event.

Synesthesia

A rhetorical trope involving shifts in imagery. It involves taking one type of sensory input (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste) and commingling it with another separate sense in an impossible way. In the resulting figure of speech, we end up talking about how a color sounds, or how a smell looks.

Rhetorical Question

A question that is not intended to be answered.

Hyperbole

Exaggerated statement or claim not meant to be taken literally.

Understatement

Presenting something as smaller, worse, or less important than it really is.

Parallelism

Figure of speech in which two or more elements of a sentence (or series of sentences) have the same grammatical structure.

Anaphora

Repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of the sentence.

Epistrophe

The repetition of a word at the end of two or more sentences.

Juxtaposition

Placement of two things closely together to emphasize similarities or differences.

Antithesis

Figure of speech that juxtaposes two contrasting or opposing ideas, usually within parallel grammatical structures.

Oxymoron

Two seemingly contradictory words are placed together because their unlikely combination reveals a deeper truth.

Paradox

Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level. Common paradoxes seem to reveal a deeper truth through their contradictions.

Anadiplosis

A literary term for the repetition of the last word in one line or clause, to begin the next.

Epanalepsis

Figure of speech defined by the repetition of the initial word or words of a clause or sentence, at the end of the same clause or sentence.

Alliteration

Repetition of consonant sounds and/or letters in a word or phrase.

Asyndeton

The omissions of conjunctions in a series of items or clauses.

Polysyndeton

Process of using conjunctions frequently in a sentence and/or placed very close to each other.

Antimetabole

A verbal expression in which the second half of the sentence has the same words as the first, but the words are flipped to create a reverse statement.

Chiasmus

A rhetorical inversion of the second of two parallel structures – Words DO NOT repeat.

Balanced Sentence

A sentence where phrases or clauses balance each other by their structure, meaning or length.

Cumulative Sentence

Sentence where an independent clause is followed by a series of dependent clauses.

Periodic Sentence

Sentence that leaves the main clause out until the end of the sentence.

Ethos

Refers to the trustworthiness or credibility of the writer or speaker to appeal to the audience.

Pathos

Persuades by appealing to a person’s emotions and evokes emotion from the audience in order to appeal.

Logos

Writer uses facts, statistics, and logical reasoning to appeal to the audience.