Rhetorical Terms- Writing Material Flashcards
Aesthetic Reading
Reading to experience the world of the text.
Ex: One often reads John Steinbeck’s novels, like The Grapes of Wrath, to experience his detailed settings.
Aim
The goal a writer or speaker hopes to achieve with the text – for example, to clarify difficult material, to inform, to convince, to persuade. Also called intention and purpose.
Ex: In Pride, Dagoberto Gilb’s aim is to define pride and what it means to him.
Anglo-Saxon diction
Word choice characterized by simple, often one- or two- syllable nouns, adjectives, and adverbs.
Ex: Words include “thinking,” “kingly,” “bridge,” “stone,” and “early.”
Apposition
Two nouns that are adjacent to each other and reference the same thing.
Ex: I know the dog Toto.
Arrangement
In a spoken or written text, the placement of ideas for effect.
Ex: In essays, writers often strategically arrange their essays into paragraphs and order their points from most convincing to least.
Assonance
The repetition of vowel sounds in the stressed syllables of two or more adjacent words.
Ex: “Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies” (John Keats)
Assumption
An opinion, a perspective, or a belief that a writer or speaker thinks the audience holds.
Ex: “We think a problem is weakness, mental laziness, intellectual inflation, but an issue is deep-rooted, interior, and personal.” (Allison Amend)
Attitude
In an adapted dramatistic pentad created by a speaker or writer in order to invent materials, the manner in which an action is carried out.
Ex: “Truth be told, we have replaced problem with issue in our vocabulary. And issue is a euphemism.” (Allison Amend)
Auxesis
Magnifying the importance or gravity of something by referring it with a disproportionate name.
Ex: Calling a scratch on an arm a wound
Begging of the question
The situation that results when a writer or speaker constructs an argument on an assumption that the audience does not accept.
Ex: This painting is horrible because it is obviously worthless.
Causal relationship
The relationship expressing, “If X is the cause, then Y is the effect,” or, “If Y is the effect, then X caused it.”
Ex: If the dog runs away, then the boy will be sad.
character
A personage in a narrative.
Ex: Romeo was a character in Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare
Complex sentences
A sentence with one independent clause and one or more dependent clauses.
Ex: As long as it isn’t cold, it doesn’t matter if it rains.
Compound-complex sentences
A sentence with two or more independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses.
Ex: The package arrived in the morning, but the courier left before I could check the contents.
Context
The convergence of time, place, audience, and motivating factors in which a piece of writing or a speech is situated.
Ex: Kate Chopin lived in the late 1800s in Southern America as a feminist. This background formed the foundation of The Awakening.
Contradiction
One of the types of rhetorical invention included under the common topic of relationships. Contradiction urges the speaker or writer to invent an example or a proof that is counter to the main idea or argument.
Ex: “If war is the cause of our misery, peace is the way to promote our happiness.”
Denotation
The “dictionary definition” of a word, in contrast to its connotation, or implied meaning.
Ex: A house is literally a dwelling usually for a family
Descriptive writing
Writing that relies on sensory images to characterize a person or place.
Ex: “so much depends/ upon/ the red wheel/ barrow/ glazed with rain/ water/ beside the white/ chickens” (William Carlos Williams)
Dialect
The describable patterns of language–grammar and vocabulary–used by a particular cultural or ethnic population.
Ex: A Caribbean dialect is often “sing-songish” and leaves out words from sentences.
Dialogue
Conversation between and among characters.
Ex: “Jim, I don’t get it,” Blair said.
Jim raised an eyebrow. “Don’t get what?”
Diction
Word choice, which is viewed on scales of formality/informality, concreteness/abstraction, Latinate derivation/Anglo-Saxon derivation, and denotative value/connotative value.
Ex: Using “issue” instead of “problem.”
Double entrance
The double meanings of a group of words that the speaker or writer has purposely left ambiguous.
Ex 1: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” (Shelley).
Ex 2: “West Egg especially still figures into my more fantastic dreams” (Fitzgerald 185).
Drafting
The process by which writers get something written on paper or in a computer file so that they can develop their ideas and begin moving toward an end, a start-to-finish product; the raw material for what will become the final product.
Ex: For the research paper, we will have to revise and draft many times to perfect our papers.
Dramatic Monologue
A type of poem, popular primarily in the nineteenth century, in which the speaker is delivering a monologue to an assumed group of listeners.
Ex: In “My Last Duchess,” by Robert Browning, shows off a painting of his late wife and reveals his cruelty to her.
Epistrophe
The repetition of a group of words at the end of successive clauses.
Ex: “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny compared to what lies within us” (Emerson).
Erotema
Asking a question to assert or deny something obliquely not for an answer.
Ex: “How much longer must our people endure this injustice?”
Ethos
The appeal of a text to the credibility and character of the speaker, writer, or narrator.
Ex: If you don’t graduate from high school, you will always be poor.
Exaggeration
An overstatement.
Ex: The Matrix is the best movie ever made.
Example
An anecdote or a narrative offered in support of a generalization, claim, or point.
Ex: Animals have more intelligence than imagined. “On human IQ tests, she [a gorilla named Koko] scores between 70 and 95” (Rifkin).
Exordium
In ancient roman oratory, the introduction of a speech; literally, the “web” meant to draw the audience in the speech.
Ex: Julius Caesar’s speech begins with an exordium.
Extended analogy
An extended passage arguing that if two things are similar in one or two ways, they are probably similar in other ways as well.
Ex: In “Grant and Lee: A Study in Contrasts,” Catton argues some similarities between Grant and Lee.
Extended example
An example that is carried through several sentences or paragraphs.
Ex: In “Pride,” Dagoberto Gilb extends an Ex of pride in the form of an anecdote through two paragraphs.
Fable
A narrative in which fictional characters, often animals, take actions that have ethical or moral significance.
Ex: Animal Farm, written by George Orwell, is a fable.
Figures of rhetoric
Schemes–that is, variations from typical word or sentence formation–and tropes, which are variations from typical patterns of thought.
Ex: “When I first saw her, my soul began to quiver.”
Flash-forward
A part of the plot that jumps ahead in time and returns to the present.
Ex: Oedipus is told he will sleep with his mother and kill his father by a prophet.
Heuristic
A systematic strategy or method for solving problems.
Ex: Lawrence Lessig has argued that patents in different industries should be given different amounts of time, using this strategy.
House analogy
In ancient Roman oratory, the method that speakers used to memorize their speeches, connecting the introduction to the porch of a house, the narration and partition to the front foyer, the confirmation and refutation to rooms connected to the foyer, and the conclusion to the back door.
Ex: Julius Caesar most likely used this method to memorize his speeches.
Hyperbaton
Unusual or inverted word order.
Ex: “Size matters not. Judge me by my size, do you?” (Yoda).
Imagery
Language that evokes particular sensations or emotionally rich experiences in a reader.
Ex 1: Edgar Allan Poe uses imagery in The Fall of the House of the Usher.
Ex 2: “…ran for a huge black knotted trees whose massed leaves made a fabric against the rain…” (Fitzgerald 93).
Implied metaphor
A metaphor embedded in a sentence rather than expressed directly as a sentence.
Ex 1: “John swelled and rustled his plumage.” (John was a peacock.)
Ex 2: “Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart” (Fitzgerald 25).
