Rhetorical Techniques

1. Rhetorical Techniques Choosing Your Words Carefully

2. Figurative Language • Meant to create pictures for audience • Metaphor • Personification • Simile • Allusion – Reference to well-known event, person, place or story (i.e. myths, Bible, etc) • Hyperbole • Imagery • Connotation • Analogy – Comparing something unfamiliar to something well-known • Symbol

3. Word Power • Repetition – Use of same words/phrases multiple times • “It was a strange night, a hushed night, a moonless night.” • Alliteration – Repetition of initial sounds of words • “The monster rambled, raged, and roared.” • Onomatopoeia – A word that sounds like its meaning. • “buzz”, “splash”, “crack”

4. sentence Construction • Sentence fragment – incomplete thought • “A cold, lonely room. No place to spend twenty years of a life.” • Periodic sentences – withholds the most important point in a sentence to the end. • “Whether playing a young adventurer, a fugitive from the law, or the U.S. president, there is one actor whose films always make money—Harrison Ford.”

5. sentence Construction • Reversal – repeats words/phrases in reverse order • “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” • Climactic word order – presents multiple facts in order to build to the most important fact. • “The player rose from high school, to college, to the minor leagues, and finally to the major leagues.”

6. sentence Construction • Abnormal word order – gives variety to writing by changing the usual subject-verb order • “The broken window in which the thieves entered.” • Parallel structure – repeats specific words • “This is a government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

7. sentence Construction • Understatement (Litotes) – creates the reverse effect (and adds a touch of irony) by making the fact seem less significant. • “Are you aware, Mrs. Bueller, that Ferris does not have what we consider to be an exemplary attendance record?”