Terms : Hide Images
| 7657571997 | Alliosis | Presenting alternatives: "You can eat well or you can sleep well." While such structure often results in the logical fallacy of the false dichotomy or the either/or fallacy, it can create a cleverly balanced and artistic sentence. | 0 | |
| 7657572001 | Amplification | A rhetorical figure involving a dramatic ordering of words, often emphasizing some sort of expansion or progression, whether conceptual, valuative, poetic, or even with regard to word length. "It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Superman!" | 1 | |
| 7657572002 | Anacoluthon | Intentional disruption of syntax to create intensity, excitement, confusion. "Swear here as before that you never shall note that you know aught of me." | 2 | |
| 7657572003 | Anagnorisis | The moment in a drama when the protagonist discovers something that either leads to or explains a reversal of fortune. Basically, the protagonist gains some crucial knowledge that he or she did not have. | 3 | |
| 7657572006 | Anaphora | An exact repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of successive lines or sentences, a type of parallelism. | 4 | |
| 7657572007 | Anapodoton | Deliberately creating a sentence fragment by the omission of a clause: "If only you came with me!" Good writers never use sentence fragments? Ah, but they can. And they do. When appropriate. | 5 | |
| 7657572010 | Antanaclasis | The stylistic scheme of repeating a single word, but with a different meaning each time. From Shakespeare: "for many a thousand widows/ Shall this his mock mock out of their dear husbands; Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down." Or, "Police police police." | 6 | |
| 7657572013 | Antimetabole | Repetition in reverse order: "One should eat to live, not live to eat." Or, "You like it; it likes you." The witches in Macbeth chant, "Fair is foul and foul is fair." | 7 | |
| 7657572015 | Aphorism | A concise, pointed, epigrammatic statement that purports to reveal a truth or principle. They can be attributed to a specific person. "All you need is love" (The Beatles). "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" (William Shakespeare). Once a statement is so widely known that authorship is lost, it is called a proverb. "It takes a village to raise a child." A statement that gives behavioral advice is called a maxim. "The early bird gets the worm." | 8 | |
| 7657572029 | Catachresis | A term referring to the incorrect or strained use of a word. | 9 | |
| 7657572055 | Enallage | Intentionally misusing grammar to characterize a speaker or to create a memorable phrase. Boxing manager Joe Jacobs, for instance, became immortal with the phrase, "We was robbed!" Or, the editors of Punch magazine might tell their British readers, "You pays your money, and you takes your chances." | 10 | |
| 7657572064 | Epistrophe | Repetition of a concluding word or endings: "He's learning fast; are you earning fast?" When it focuses on sounds rather than entire words, we normally call it rhyme. | 11 | |
| 7657572085 | Hendiadys | The expression of an idea by the use of usually two independent words connected by and (as nice and warm) instead of the usual combination of independent word and its modifier (as nicely warm). | 12 | |
| 7657572088 | Hypallage. | Also known as a transferred epithet, is the trope in which a modifier, usually an adjective, is applied to the "wrong" word in the sentence. The word whose modifier is thus displaced can either be actually present in the sentence, or it can be implied logically. The effect often stresses the emotions or feelings of the individual by expanding them on to the environment. Ex: "restless night," "clumsy helmet," "happy morning." | 13 | |
| 7657572089 | Hyperbaton | A generic term for changing the normal or expected order of words. "One ad does not a survey make." The term comes from the Greek for "overstepping" because one or more words "overstep" their normal position and appear elsewhere. For instance, Milton in Paradise Lost might write, "High on a throne of royal gold . . . Satan exalted sat." In normal, everyday speech, we would expect to find, "High on a throne of royal gold . . . Satan sat exalted." | 14 | |
| 7657572104 | Litotes | A trope that involves making an affirmation by negating its opposite. "Not unkind" means "kind." "Not bad" usually means "good." | 15 | |
| 7657572116 | Metonymy | The use of a word or phrase to stand in for something else which it is often physically associated. ie. Hollywood for US cinema, the Crown for UK government, the White House, City Hall. | 16 |
