![]() ![]() I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. Consider one of the most famous examples uttered by Martin Luther King in August of 1963: “I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi. In addition, anaphor is a hallmark of a lot of memorable speeches that have entered the American canon. It’s the basis of most pop music, giving three or more chances to hear a catchy theme. There is something inherently pleasing about a verbal structure built around parallel repetitive elements. Oral rhetoric especially favors anaphora. I’m not saying that he does, but I hear it a lot.” Better that a person simply take ownership of an idea if they choose to raise it.Īnaphora: –The repetition of a word or phrase for emphasis. And we could do the same for him: “Some people think the former President has serious mental health issues. Presidential candidate Donald Trump pulled this shift on President Obama all the time, raising the specter of birtherism, and then putting some daylight between himself and the bogus assertion. The wily speaker or writer doing this usually thinks he can have it both ways: repeating a slander or untruth as an innocent piece of information, then stepping out of the way and feigning a degree of neutrality. Among other things, this device is what makes television news possible.Īffirmation by Denial:– This is usually a statement in which a questionable claim is repeated, seemingly to put it into play, but then innocently disavowed. But a synecdoche has the advantage of making big ideas more apparent by reducing them to a single vessel. ![]() To be sure, the assertion is pretty reductive. His earthly practicality and fleeting idealism reflected the tensions of the time. Similarly, if we say “Abraham Lincoln captured the zeitgeist of his time” we would be giving the Civil War era a much-needed moral facelift. Think of images of firefighters in the smoke of the World Trade Center, or a Dorothea Lange photograph of a dust-bowl family. ![]() It’s an old and sometimes respectable rhetorical tactic to use one person or thing as a stand-in for a much larger class. Synecdoche: –The use single element to stand in for the whole. Here are a few favorites that condense a particular rhetorical tactic or slight-of-hand into a compact form. Recognizing them provides a thrill that may puzzle many. Indeed, almost any complex thought may benefit from new language that allows us to see what we never noticed. We students were supposed to be impressed, as if a chemistry teacher had just put two clear liquids together to produce a black solid. I can’t say that this stopped my professors, some of whom relished letting a Latinate name roll of the tongue: a kind of verbal jewel placed before us to admire. Lists of common figures of speech can reach into the dozens. They can also be obvious and functional, like the use of satire or irony. Classical forms can verge into the arcane. I’ve never been the kind of rhetorician that savors labeling odd rhetorical maneuvers with their Latin names. Some devices are helpful others can be cunning. Recurring rhetorical forms have the value of reshaping thoughts that may have grown stale.
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