Public Speaking (Summer 2019)/Stylistic Devices

We will discuss these figures of style in class, but here is a listing of some. The figures listed here barely scratch the surface of all the possible figures of style. You can do a quick internet search for “figures of style” and find a wealth of options. For a great listing of devices, I really like the “forest of rhetoric” at http://rhetoric.byu.edu/.


 * The devices we discussed during the commemorative days:

Assonance and consonance: The repetition of sounds

Alliteration: The repetition of initial consonant sounds

Anaphora: Repetition at the beginning of phrases.

Epistrophe: repetition at the ends of phrases

Epizeuxis: Repetition of the same word.

Anadiplosis: The end of one phrase begins the next

Symploce: Repetition at the beginning and ends.

Enumeratio: Listing details.

Parallelism: Similar repeated syntactic structure.


 * The devices we discussed during the advocacy days:

Asyndeton. Omitting normally occurring conjunctions.

Polysyndeton. Inserting extra conjunctions.

Tricolon: Three parallel phrases of the same length in a series.

Hypophora: Raising and responding to your own question.

Appositio: Variation on a word.

Schesis Onomaton: Variation on a phrase.

Antithesis. The pairing of contrasting words or ideas.

Antimetabole. A pattern for antithesis, where the phases are structured: A B B A.

Maxim: a short, pithy phrase.