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69 Cards in this Set

  • Front
  • Back
Rhetoric
Using language to persuade.
Logos
An appeal based on logic.
Ethos
An appeal based on authority or character.
Pathos
An appeal based on emotion.
Tone
The means of creating a relationship or conveying an attitude or mood.

Example: The tone might be formal, informal, playful, ironic, optimistic, pessimistic, or sensual.
Style
The way in which something is spoken, written, or performed.
Diction
The choice of a particular word opposed to others.

Example: A writer could call a formation by many words
-- a stone, a boulder, an outcropping, a pile of rocks, a cairn, a mound, or even a "anomalous geological feature".
Trope
A figure of speech with an unexpected twist in the meaning of the word.
Scheme
Figures of speech that deal with word order.
Syntax
The orderly arrangement of words into sentences to express ideas.
Alliteration
The Repeating of a constant sound in close proximity to others.

Example: Peter Piper Picked A Peck of Pickled Peppers.
Allusion
A casual reference in literature to a person, place, even, or another passage of literature.
Anaphora
The intentional repetition of beginning clauses in order to create an artistic affect.

Example:
Churchill declared, "We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on the end. We shall fight in France....
Antithesis
Using opposite phrases in close conjunction.

Example:
"Her character is white as sunlight, black as midnight".
Archaic Diction
Diction of an earlier or more primitive time.
Asyndeton
The artisitc elimination of conjunctions in a sentence to create a particular effect.

Example:
"You're a flower, You're beautiful, You smell wonderful..."
Hortative Sentence
A sentence that exhorts, advises, or calls to action.

Example:
"Your work is very promising".
Imperative
A grammatical mood that expresses direct commands or requests.

Example:
"Could you come here for a moment?", "I beg you to stop."
Inverstion (anastrophe)
The inverted order of words or events as a rhetorical scheme.
Juxtaposition
The arrangement of two or more ideas, characters, actions, settings, phrases or words side-by-side or in similar narrative moments for the purpose of comparision, contast, rhetorical effect, suspense, or chracter development.
Metonymy
Using a vaguely suggestive, physical object to embody a more general idea.

Example:
"Washington" refers to the "White House". The entire movie-making industry in the L.A suburb is "Hollywood". The advertising industry is "Madison Avenue".
Parallelism
When the writer establishes similar patters of grammatical structure and length.

Example:
"King Alfred tried to make the law clear: precise and equitable".
Rhetorical Question
A question asked often to get a definite answer from the reader.

Example:
"What should honest citizens do?"
Refutation
The part of an argument wherein a speaker or writer anticipates and counters opposing points of view.

Example:
"There will be those who say 'Go slow. Don't upset the status quo.' No doubt we will hear this from competitors who perceive that they have an advantage today and want regulation to protect their advantage. Or we will hear from those who are behind in the race to compete and want to slow down deployment for their own self interest. Or we will hear from those that just want to resist changing the status quo. They will resis change for that reason alone."
Analogy
Reasoning or explaning from parallel cases. A simile is an expressed analogy; a metaphor is an implied one.

Example:
"Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo." (Don Marquis)
Syllogism
A form of deductive reasoning consisting of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion.

Example:
"LOGIC, n. The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. The basic of logic is the syllogism, consisiting of a mjaor and minor premise and conclusion--thus:

Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man.

Minor Premise: One man can dig a pothole in sixty seconds; therefore--

Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a pothole in one second. This may be called the syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed."
(Ambrose Bierce, The Devils Dictionary)
Concession
An argumentative strategy by which a speaker or writer acknowledges the validity of an opponent's point.

Example:
"The audience gets the impression that the person capable of making frank confessions and generous conessions is not only a good person but a person so confident of the strength of his or her position that he or she can afford to concede points to the opposition."
(Edward Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, Oxford Univ. Press, 1999)
Hyperbole
A figure of speech in which exaggeration is used for emphasis or effect; an extravagant statement.

Example:
"Ladies and gentlemen, I've been to Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and I can say without hyperbole that this is a million times worse than all of them put together."
(Kent Brockman, The Simpsons)
Euphemism
Substitution of an inoffensive term (such as "passed away") for one considered offensively explicit ("died").

Example:

Dr.House: I'm busy
Thirteen: We need you to...
Dr.House: Actually, as you can see. I'm not busy. It's just a euphemism for "get the hell out of here."
("Dying Changes Everything," House, M.D.)
Understatement
A figure of speech in which a writer or speaker deliberatley makes a situation seem less important or serious than it is.

Example:
"It's just a flesh wound."
(Black Knight, after having both of his arms cut off, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail)
Periodic Sentence
A long and frequently involved sentence, marked by suspended syntax, in which the sense is not completed until the final word -- usually with an emphatic climax.

Example:
“Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garment shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent and soft, and slow,
Descends the snow.”

(Longfellow, "Snowflakes")
Loose Sentence
A sentece structure in which a main clause is followed by subordinate phrases and clauses. Contrast with periodic sentence.

Example:
"He went into town to buy groceries, to visit his friends, and to go to the bookstore."
Parallel Sentence
Using the same pattern of words to show that two or more ideas have the same level of importance. This can happen at the word, phrase, or clause level. The usual way to join parallel structures is with the use of coordinating conjunctions such as "and" or "or."

Example:
Mary like hiking, swimming, and bicycling.
Digression
A section of a composition or speech that is an intentional change of subject.

Example:
Good point. I also hate people who do not respect others. And it's mostly kids these days who you can't trust. You know the other day I asked a boy in the street...
Antecedent
The noun or noun phrase that a pronoun refers to.

Example: "When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them."
(G.K. Chesterton)
Aphorism
A tersely phrased statement of a truth or opinion.

Example: "Sits he on ever so high a throne, a man still sits on his bottom."
(Montaigne)
Apostrophe
A figure of speech in which some absent or nonexistent person or thing is addressed as if present and capable of understanding.

Example: "Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again . . .."
(Paul Simon, "The Sounds of Silence")
Colloquial/Colloquialism
The characteristic of writing that seeks the effect of informal spoken language as distinct from formal or literary English.

Example: "We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we laughed--only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all--that night, nor the next, nor the next."
(Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884)
Didactic
Intended or inclined to teach or instruct, often excessively.

Example: "Dr. Spock could never understand why such critics as the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale and Spiro Agnew saw him in the 1960's as a proponent of instant gratification and rebelliousness. In advising parents, he was neither permissive nor authoritarian. His most famous suggestion was 'trust yourself,' a dramatic break from the rigid, didactic advice contained in parent guides until that time."
("Dr. Spock's Children," The New York Times, March 17, 1998)
Homily
A sermon on a moral or religious topic.
Verbal Irony
A trope (or figure of speech) in which the intended meaning of a statement differs from the meaning that the words appear to express.

Example:
Commander William T. Riker: Charming woman!
Lt. Commander Data: [voice-over] The tone of Commander Riker's voice makes me suspect that he is not serious about finding Ambassador T'Pel charming. My experience suggests that in fact he may mean the exact opposite of what he says. Irony is a form of expression I have not yet been able to master.
("Data's Day," Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1991)
Situational Irony
An occasion in which the outcome is significantly different from what was expected or considered appropriate.

Example: "Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends."
(Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 1975)
Dramatic Irony
An occasion in a play, film, or other work in which a character's words or actions convey a meaning unperceived by the character but understood by the audience.

Example:
"In There's Something About Mary (1998), [when] Ted thinks he's been arrested for picking up a hitchhiker while the audience knows he's being questioned by police about a murder, otherwise innocuous lines he delivers, such as 'I've done it several times before' and 'It's no big deal,' generate laughter."
(Paul Gulino, Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach. Continuum, 2004)
Synesthesia
Artistic and poetic devices which attempt to express a linkage between the senses.

Example: "The word would fill her mind for a few minutes with a single color: not an unpleasant sensation but still an intrusion... Patriarch: Brown, she thought, a temple of a word, a shiny red brown, like the surface of a chestnut."
(Julia Glass, “The Whole World Over”)
Rhetorical Modes
In composition studies, the four traditional categories of written texts: narration, description, exposition, and argument.
Narration
In composition studies, one of the traditional modes of discourse that recounts an event or a series of related events
Description
A rhetorical strategy using senosry details to portray a person, place, or thing.
Exposition
A statement or type of composition intended to give information about (or explanation of) an issue, subject, method, or idea.
Argument
A course of reasoning aimed at demostrating truth or falsehood.
Segregating Sentence
Segregating sentences are especially useful in descriptive and narrative writing. They nanlyze a complicated perception or action into its parts and arrange these in a signifiacnt order.

Example:
From all the hill came screams. A piece of sky beside the crecent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover..... [reptitive, emphatic, uncomplicated sentences]
Freight-Train Sentence
A speed structure for packin force into a a story or varying the pace. It can help you plow through tedious material. Put a sbuject and verb at the front and then couple a string oftwo or more boxcars -- objects or clauses of the same construction. [Events, ideas, impression, feelings, or preceptions as immediatley as possible.]

Example:
It's a sentence style often favored by excited children: And then Uncle Richard took us to the Dairy Queen and we had ice cream and I had strawberry and the bottom of my cone fell off and there was ice cream all over the floor and Mandy laughed and then she threw up and Uncle Richard took us home and he didn't say much the whole way.
Parataxis Sentence
Phrases or clauses arranged independently: a coordinate, rahter than a subordinate, construction. [without conjunctions]

Example:
"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of lief insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun."
Triadic Sentence
A series of three parallel words, phrases, or clauses. [freight-train sentence, repetitive, not open-ended]

Example: "Tell me and I forget, Teach me and I remeber, Involve me and I learn."
(Benjamin Franklin)
Cumlative Sentence
An independent clause followed by a series of subordinate constructions (phrases or clauses) that gather details about a person, place, event, or idea.

Example: "I write this at a wide desk in a pine shed as I always do these recent years, in this life I pray will last, while summer sun closes the sky to Orion and to all the other winter stars over my roof."
Balanced Sentence
A sentence where two phrases or clauses involve similar structure, meaning, or length.

Example:
"White chickens lay white eggs, and brown chicken lay brown eggs; so if white cows give white milk, do brown cows give chocolate milk?"
Convoluted Sentence
A sentence in which the subject and main verb are sepreated by an interrupting clause or phrase.
Centered Sentence
Main clause occupies the middle of the sentence.

Example: "Having wanted to walk on the sea like St.Peter he had taken an involuntary bath, losing the better part of his reputation."
Fragement Sentence
Single Work, phrase, or dependent clause standing alone as a sentence.

Example: "Remove the cold and stupid eyeball, crack the back against the brass bed rail, it would bleat still. The gauze back would slit, and I could see the disk with six holes, the secret of the sound. A mere metal roundness.
Chiasmus
A verbal patter (a tyle of antithesis) in which the second half of an expression is balanced against the first with the parts reversed. Essentially the same as antimetabole.

Example: "I am stuck on Band-Aid, and Band-Aid's stuck on me."
Ambiguity
The presence of two or more possible meaning in any passage. Also, a fallacy in which the same term is used in more than one way.

Example: I can't tell you how much I enjoyed meeting your husband.
Pretensions
A false or unspportable quality.
Cliches
A trite expression, often a figure of speech whose effectiveness has been worn out through overuse and excessive familiarity.

Example: What goes around comes around.
Jargon
The specialized language of a professional, occupational, or other group, often meaningless to outsiders.

Example: "Hygienic treatment' is funeral jargon for the temporary preservationof a corpse."
Denotation
The direct or dictionary meaning of a word, in contrast to its figurative or associated meannings (connotation)

Example: "You know a phrase I never understood? King size. It's used to denote something larger, but most of the kings you see are short. You ever notice that? Usually a king is a short little fat guy."
Connotation Of a Word
The emotinoal implications and associations that a word may carry, in contrast to its denotative meanings.

Example: The name reservation has a negative connotation among Native Americans -- an intern camp of sorts.
Onomatopoeia
The formation or use of words (such as hiss or murmur) that imitate the sounds associated with the objects or actions they refer to.

Example: "Snap, Crackle, Pop...Rice Krispies."
Allegory
Extending a metaphor through an entire speech or passage so that objects, person, and actions in the text are equated with meaning that lie outside the text.

Example: "And now, I said, let me show in a fgure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: Behold! human beings living in an undergound, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the cave; here they have been from their childhood, and have their lges and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them....q
Conceit
An elaborate poetic image or a far-fetched comparison of very dissimilar things.

Example:
"Shall I compare thee to a sumer's day?"
Extended Metaphor
A comparison between two unlike things that contiues throughout a series of sentences in a paragraph or lines in a poem.

Example: "Hope is the thing with feathers. That perches in the soul, And sings the tune--without words, And never stops at all. and sweetest in the gale is hear; And sore must be the storm....