Rhetoric and Style

What does it mean to write "with style"? Here we consider some of the various ways in which professional writers have defined and characterized style.

Countless books on writing promise to teach us how to improve our style. Yet over the centuries, many professional writers have challenged this attitude toward writing, rejecting the notion that style is a distinct, separable quality that can be taught or learned.

Modern theories of oral and written communication remain heavily influenced by the basic rhetorical principles introduced in ancient Greece by Isocrates and Aristotle, and in Rome by Cicero and Quintilian. Here, we'll briefly introduce these key figures and identify some of their central ideas.

Your answers to the 20 questions in this checklist should help you conduct an effective audience analysis for a speech or written report.

These lists are intended to help you identify figures, tropes, and other rhetorical strategies and devices.

Though there are hundreds of figures of speech (many of them included in our Glossary of Grammatical & Rhetorical Terms), here we'll focus on just 20 of the most common figures.

There are hundreds of figures and tropes. And while we may not recognize their names, we use and hear many of these devices every day. So let's take a look at 20 uncommon words (most of them Latin or Greek) for some fairly common rhetorical strategies.

This quiz should help you to understand and remember the terms and concepts introduced in our page on the Top 20 Figures of Speech.

In this review quiz, we have collected 35 of the best known slogans introduced by advertisers over the past century. Your job is to choose the one figure of speech that each slogan most clearly illustrates.

This quiz should help you to understand, distinguish, and remember many of the rhetorical terms in our glossary.

Monty Python's "Announcement for People Who Like Figures of Speech" not only identifies over 30 figurative devices but deftly and accurately illustrates most of them as well. To assist readers who may not be acquainted with such exotic figures as hypallage and zeugma, we have conscientiously annotated the Python team's disquisition with links to definitions and additional examples in our Glossary…

The anarchic members of Britain's favorite comedy troupe have revitalized countless figures of speech over the past 40-odd years.

These ten study questions invite you to consider some of the functions of figurative language in the context of particular poems, essays, speeches, and other texts.

These ten discussion questions provide opportunities to apply some of the key concepts and terms used in rhetorical analyses of essays, speeches, poems, short stories, and novels.

If you have been studying classical rhetoric, these 15 study questions will help you review some key concepts introduced by major figures in rhetorical history.

Writers use similes and metaphors to explain things, to express emotion, and to make their writing more vivid and entertaining. Discovering fresh similes and metaphors to use in your own writing also means discovering new ways to look at your subjects.

In addition to creating striking images to make our writing more interesting, similes and metaphors can be used to clarify and convey ideas.

Although students should have no trouble understanding most of these traditional similes for sweetness, they may find them a bit old-fashioned. If so, encourage them to create some sweet similes of their own using more contemporary subjects for comparison.

Oxymorons are often found in literature, but as shown by this list of 100 awfully good examples, they are also part of our everyday speech.

When it came to practicing effective strategies of repetition, rhetoricians in ancient Greece and Rome had a big bag full of tricks, each with a fancy name. Here are seven common strategies--with some up-to-date examples.

When it came to practicing effective strategies of repetition, classical rhetoricians had a bag full of tricks. Match the names of these ten repetitive figures of speech with the appropriate definitions and examples that follow.

In descriptive prose, writers sometimes employ lists (or series) to bring a person or a place to life through the sheer abundance of precise details. Enjoy reading some examples by four major writers.

A tricolon is a series of three parallel words, phrases, or clauses. It's a simple enough structure, yet potentially a powerful one.

One part of Barack Obama's secret for stirring a crowd is the magic number three. In rhetorical terms, that's a tricolon: a series of three parallel words, phrases, or clauses. Obama's victory speech on November 4, 2008 was teeming with tricolons--as shown in these excerpts.

In formal writing, the common proscription against fragments often makes good sense. But not always. As we'll see here, the sentence fragment may be used deliberately to create a variety of powerful effects.

The contemporary interrupter is a (nerd alert) metadiscursive trick. The writer pauses to address the reader directly and signal her feelings...

Homer Simpson has contributed far more to the English language than just the popular interjection "D'oh." Let's take a look at some of those rich contributions--and along the way review several rhetorical terms.

Some metaphors--such as the comparison of life to a journey--are so common (or "conventional") that we may overlook the fact that they are metaphors. Here we look at some different kinds of metaphors, with examples drawn from poems, essays, songs, speeches, and advertisements.

All of us, every day, speak, write, and think in metaphors. And there are countless ways of looking at them, thinking about them, using them. Here are 13 types of metaphors, with links to examples and extended definitions.

As the following observations make clear, comedian Stephen Colbert knows a thing or two about drawing surprising comparisons and uncovering concealed relationships.

As regular viewers of "House, M.D." are aware, the show's deeply disturbed protagonist (played by Hugh Laurie) is inclined to deliver inflammatory eructations of festering figures of speech. That is, he can snap off your head with the sharp edge of a metaphor.

As this rich collection of 99 metaphors demonstrates, love has been compared to everything from a jewel and a fevered dream to a snowmobile and an exploding cigar. Alongside quotations from Plato, Ovid, and Shakespeare you'll find fresh figures from the likes of Tom Robbins, Eminem, and Rita Mae Brown.

Over the centuries, writers have not only been making good metaphors but also studying these powerful figurative expressions--considering where metaphors come from, what purposes they serve, why we enjoy them, and how we understand them. Here are the thoughts of 15 writers, philosophers, and critics on the power and pleasure of metaphor.

Dr. Mardy Grothe's latest "word & language" book should be an exciting voyage of discovery for committed readers. In "Ifferisms: An Anthology of Aphorisms That Begin With the Word 'If'" (HarperCollins, 2009), Grothe introduces us to nearly 2,000 nuggets of conditional wisdom--or at least of apparent wisdom.

If you put any trust in proverbs, you already know that time heals, steals, and flies. And you're equally aware that time is something we all make and take, keep and save, spend, waste, kill, and lose. Here, if you have the time to spare, are twenty metaphorical definitions of time.

With the same wit and enthusiasm that he brought to his earlier studies of chiasmus and paradox, Dr. Mardy Grothe sets out to refresh our language and our spirits with this entertaining collection of figurative comparisons: "I Never Metaphor I Didn't Like."

In defense of hyperbole as a forceful figure of speech, we offer these ten examples of the trope at its best--imaginative, insightful, and appropriately outlandish.

We may have said "ciao ciao" to "The Sopranos," but let's never forget our favorite crime family's gifts to the ancient field of rhetoric.

This exercise in alliteration originally appeared in "Gleanings From the Harvest-Fields of Literature, Science and Art," edited by Charles C. Bombaugh (T. Newton Kurtz, 1860).

This comic poem originally appeared in the anthology "Such Nonsense!" (1918). Try reading the poem aloud to appreciate the apt alliterations of the anonymous author.

Countless versions of this alliterative poem appeared in American and British magazines throughout the 19th century.

Anadiplosis is a figurative device in which the last word of one line or clause is repeated at the start of the next line or clause. In this 19th-century poem, anadiplosis serves to link all 16 lines.

Derived from the Greek word for "abuse," the rhetorical device of bdelygmia is a form of invective: an exuberant rant, a litany of disparaging remarks, a string of stinging criticisms.

If you want to leave your audience with something to remember the next time you write or give a speech, try employing the Power of X: chiasmus.

The terms snarl words and purr words were coined by S. I. Hayakawa to describe highly connotative language that often serves as a substitute for serious thought and well-reasoned argument.

One of the craftiest orations in the history of American politics was the "Whiskey Speech," delivered in April 1952 by a young Mississippi legislator named Noah S. "Soggy" Sweat, Jr.

Countless words have been written about President Abraham Lincoln's brief speech at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863. Some of those words are accurate; some are not.

One way to develop our own essay-writing skills is to carefully examine how professional writers achieve a range of different effects in their work. Such a study is called a rhetorical analysis. Here you will find a sample rhetorical analysis of E. B. White's essay "The Ring of Time."

As you read John Gay’s mini-anthology of "New Similes," consider how many of these figures might today be thought of as clichés.