AP Lang Rhetorical Terms

Alliteration – Repetition of the same sound beginning several words or syllables in sequence.
Allusion – Brief reference to a person, event, or place (real or fictitious) or to a work of art.
Ambiguity (Ambiguous) – The multiple meanings, either intentional or unintentional, of a word, phrase, sentence or passage.
Analogy – A comparison between two seemingly dissimilar things. Often, an analogy uses something simple or familiar to explain something unfamiliar or complex.
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 parallel construction.
Aphorism – A terse statement of known authorship that expresses a general truth and moral principle.
Audience – The listener, viewer, or reader of a text. Most texts are likely to have multiple audiences.
Claim – Also called an assertion or proposition, a claim states the argument’s main idea or position. A claim differs from a topic or subject in that a claim has to be arguable.

Colloquialism (Colloquial Speech) – Words or phrases that have a conversational feel and are not generally used in formal written English.
Connotation – Meanings or associations that readers have with a word beyond its dictionary definition, or denotation. Connotations are often positive or negative, and they often greatly affect the author’s tone.
Context – The circumstances, atmosphere, attitudes, and events surrounding a text.
Denotation – The strict, literal dictionary definition of a word, devoid of any emotion, attitude or color.
Emphasis – Emphasis allows the writer to place importance on a particular idea. By positioning an idea in a certain place structurally, by proportioning a greater amount of words, by isolating a key word or phrase, or by repeating the wording, the writer creates emphasis. The ideas that the author emphasizes creates meaning in the piece.
Ethos – Greek for “character.” Speakers appeal to ethos to demonstrate that they are credible and trustworthy to speak on a given topic. Ethos is established by both who you are and what you say.
Euphemism – Greek for “good speech,” euphemisms are a more agreeable or less offensive substitute for generally unpleasant words or concepts. May be used to adhere to political correctness or to add humor or ironic understatement.
Figurative Language (figure of speech) – Nonliteral language, sometimes referred to as tropes or metaphorical language, often evoking strong imagery, figures of speech often compare one thing to another either explicitly (simile) implicitly (metaphor). Other forms of figurative language include personification, paradox, overstatement (hyperbole), understatement, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony.
Hyperbole – Deliberate exaggeration used for emphasis or to produce a comic or ironic effect; an overstatement to make a point.
Imagery – A description of how something looks, feels, tastes, smells, or sounds. Imagery may use literal or figurative language to appeal to the senses.

Irony – A figure of speech that occurs when a speaker or character says one thing but means something else, or when what is said is the opposite of what is expected, creating a noticeable incongruity.
Logos – Greek for “embodied thought.” Speakers appeal to logos, or reason, by offering clear, rational ideas and using specific details, examples, facts, statistics, or expert testimony to back them up.
Metaphor – Figure of speech that compares two things without using like or as.
Oxymoron – A paradox made up of two seemingly contradictory words.
Paradox – A statement or situation that is seemingly contradictory on the surface, but delivers an ironic truth.
Parallelism – Similarity of structure in a pair or series of related words, phrases, or clauses.
Pathos – Greek for “suffering” or “experience.” Speakers appeal to pathos to emotionally motivate their audience. More specific appeals to pathos might play on the audience’s values, desires, and hopes, on the one hand, or fears and prejudices, on the other.

Persona – Greek for “mask.” The face or character that a speaker shows to his or her audience.
Personification – Attribution of a lifelike quality to an inanimate object or an idea.
Purpose – The goal the speaker wants to achieve.
Rhetoric – Aristotle defined rhetoric as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” In other words, it is the art of finding ways of persuading an audience.
Rhetorical Appeals – Rhetorical techniques used to persuade an audience by emphasizing what they find most important or compelling. The three major appeals are to ethos (character), logos (reason), and pathos (emotion).
Rhetorical Question – Figure of speech in the form of a question posed for rhetorical effect rather than for the purpose of getting an answer.
Style – A writer’s specific way of saying things. Style includes arrangement of ideas, word choice, syntax, and figurative language. We can analyze and describe an author’s personal style and make judgments on how appropriate it is to the author’s purpose.

Syntax – The arrangement of words into phrases, clauses, and sentences. This includes word order (subject-verb-object, for instance, or an inverted structure); the length and structure of sentences (simple, compound, complex, or compound-complex); and such schemes as parallelism, juxtaposition, antithesis, and antimetabole.
Theme – A writer’s thoughts on a topic. It is not JUST the topic, but what the author develops in terms of what he believes about the topic.
Tone – A speaker’s attitude toward the subject conveyed by the speaker’s stylistic and rhetorical choices.
Understatement – A figure of speech in which something is presented as less important, dire, urgent, good, and so on, than it actually is, often for satiric or comic effect. Also called litotes, it is the opposite of hyperbole.
Vernacular – The speech patterns of a particular group of people or region.

Voice – The unique flavor of a piece based upon the author. An author adds his or her voice to a piece by creating a tone with diction, syntax, imagery, etc. The author’s voice is what makes his or her writing personal and unique.