Rhetorical Strategies/terms Part 1 (11/15)

Front 1

abstraction

Back 1

an idea disassociated from any specific instance; expresses a quality apart from an object

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aesthetic

Back 2

A guiding principle in matters of artistic beauty and taste; artistic sensibility

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allegory

Back 3

the expression by means of symbolic fictional figures and actions of truths or generalizations about human existence

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alliteration

Back 4

the repetition of the same sound at the beginning of successive words (consonant)

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allusion

Back 5

a reference, explicit or implicit, to something in previous literature or history

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ambiguous

Back 6

a word, phrase, or sentence whose meaning can be interpreted in more than one way

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analogy

Back 7

an extended comparison between two things/instances/people etc. that share some similarity to make a point

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anaphora

Back 8

repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginning of successive clauses, sentences, or lines

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anastrophe

Back 9

normal word order is reversed or rearranged

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antithesis

Back 10

the rhetorical contrast of ideas by means of parallel arrangement of words, clauses, or sentences

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aphorism

Back 11

a brief saying embodying a moral, a concise statement of a principle or precept given in pointed words

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apostrophe

Back 12

when an absent person, an abstract concept, or an important object is directly addressed

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appositive

Back 13

a noun or noun phrase that renames another noun right beside it

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assonance

Back 14

the repetition of vowel sounds but not consonant sounds

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asyndeton

Back 15

conjunctions are omitted, producing a fast-paced and rapid prose

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atmosphere

Back 16

the mood or pervasive feeling insinuated by a literary work

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audience

Back 17

part of your rhetorical situation (speaker, subject, audience); the person or persons to whom comments are directed (affects tone, meaning)

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bildungsroman

Back 18

this genre of literature denotes the story of a single individual's growth and development within the context of a defined social order. The growth process, at its roots a quest story, has been described as both "an apprenticeship to life" and a "search for meaningful existence within society"

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cacophony

Back 19

harsh, discordant sounds. Opposite of euphony.

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chiasmus

Back 20

repetition of ideas in inverted order

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climax

Back 21

writer arranges ideas in the order of importance (not that good of a definition/explanation of this term...)

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colloquialism

Back 22

characteristic of spoken or written communication that seeks to imitate informal speech

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concrete

Back 23

opposite of abstract; identifies things perceived through the senses (touch, smell, sight, hearing, and taste), such as soft, stench, red, loud, or bitter

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connotation

Back 24

the set of associations implied by a word in addition to its literal meaning

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consonance

Back 25

the repetition of consonant sounds, but not vowels, as in assonance.

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denotation

Back 26

the literal meaning of a word, the dictionary meaning. Opposite of connotation

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detail

Back 27

think of "The Rattler" (oh no!). The snake "turned a little to watch what I would do." This quote is strictly detail, creating a simple image, with no connotation at all. (Im still waiting for a defintion...)

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dialect

Back 28

a regional variety of language distinguished by features of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation from other regional varieties and constituting together with them a single language (think Jim in Huck Finn)