Rhetorical Device Examples

Aposiopesis

-"You know what they say: birds of a feather..." -"I can't believe she lets them get away with that! If they were my kids..." -"Well, I lay if I get ahold of you I'll--." ~ Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer -"I will have such revenges on you both that all the world shall--I will do things--What they are yet, I know not; but they shall be the terrors of the earth!" ~ William Shakespeare, King Lear

Metaphor

-"All the world's a stage." ~ William Shakespeare, As You Like it -"My heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill." ~ William Sharp, "The lonely Hunter" -"Language is a road map of a culuture. It tells you where its people came from and where they are going." Rita Mae Brown

Personification

-"And indeed there will be time for the yellow smoke that slides along the street, rubbing its back upon the window panes." ~ T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" -"What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns." ~ Wilfred Owen, "Anthem for Doomed Youth" -"Ten thousand [daffodils] saw I at a glance/ Tossing their heads in sprightly dance." ~ William Wordsworht, "Daffodils"

Epistrophe

-"As long as the white man sent you to Korea, you bled. He sent you to Germany, you bled. He sent you to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese, you bled." ~ Malcolm X -"Where affections bear rule, there reason is subdues, honesty is subdued, good will is subdued, and all things else that withstand evil, for eer are subdued." ~ Thomas Wilsion -"This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedon-- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not be perish from the eart." ~ Abraham Lincoln

Antimetabole

-"Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." ~ JFK -"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." ~ Winston Churchill -"We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, the rock was landed on us." ~ Malcolm X -"The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think." ~ H.L. Mencken

Chiasmus

-"By the day the frolic, and the dance by night." ~ Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of HUman Wishes -"He led bravely, and we bravely followed."

Antithesis

-"Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." ~ Barry Goldwater -"Not that I loved Ceaser less, but that I loved Rome more." ~ William Shakespeare, Julius Caeser -"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." ~ Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Anadiplosis

-"Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." ~Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back -"The love of wicked men converts to fear, that fear to hate, and hate turns one or both to worthy danger and deserved death." ~ William Shakespeare, Richard II -"Aboard my ship, excellent performance is standard. Standard performance is sub-standard. Sub-standard performance is not permitted to exist." ~ Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutin -"If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character. If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home. If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation. If there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world." ~ Confucious

Apostrophe

-"For Brutus, as you know, was Caeser's angel. Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caeser loved him." ~ Wiliam Shakespeare, Julius Caeser -"Roll on, thou dark and deep blue ocean" ~ Lord Byron, "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" -"Science! True daughet of Old Time thou art!" ~ Edgar Allen Poe, "To Science"

Rhetorical Question

-"Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions senses affections, passions?" ~ William Shakespeare, Mercahnt of Venice -"Do you then really think that you have commited your follies in order to spare your son them?" ~ Herman Hesse, Siddhartha -"You think what I do is playing God, but you presume to know what God wants. Do you you think that's not playing God?" ~ John Irving, The Cider House Rules

Zeugma

-"He carried a strobe light and the responsibility for the lives of his men." ~ Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried -"You held your breath and the door for me." ~ Alanis Morrisete, "Head over Feet" -"Yes, our teeth and ambitions are bared." ~ Scar, The Lion King

Metonymy

-"He is a man of cloth." -"The pen is mightier than the sword." -"The suits on Wall Street walked off with most of our savings."

Anticlimax

-"Here thou, great Anna! whom three reals obey, Dost sometimes counsel take-and sometimes tea." ~ Alexander Pope, The rape of the Lock -"Die and endow a college or a cat." -"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse." ~ Charles V

Isocolon

-"His purpose was to impress the ignorant, to perplex the dubious, and to confound the scrupulous." -"Let each man search his conscience and search his speeches." ~ Winston Churchill -"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, Frnech to men, and German to my horse." ~ Charles V -"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessing; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries." ~ Winston Churchill -"It is by logic we prove, but by intuition we discover." ~ Leonardo da Vinci -"When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Meiosis

-"I can see why you would forget; I mean, it's only cancer." -A man responds to his wife's argument that she doesn't want to move to Phoenix because of the heat by saying, "Well, yes, it's a little warm..." -"In Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, a suburban dinner party is invaded by Death, who wears a long black cloak and carries a scythes. He is the Grim Reaper; the party is over; the guests must all go with him. "Well," says one party guest, "that's cast rather a gloom over the evening, hasn't it?

Litotes

-"I don't know what he's complaining about. I mean, the man's driving a new Lexus; he's not exactly a pauper." -"The headache John developed did little to improve his mood." -"War is no picnic."

Alliteration

-"I have Stood still and stopped the sound of feet."~ Robert Frost, "Aquainted With The Night" -"Veni, vidi, vici." ~ Julius Caesar -"Let us go forth to lead the land we love" ~ John F. Kennedy

Polysyndeton

-"I said, 'Who killed him?' and he said, 'I don't know who killed him but he's dead alright,' and it was dark and there was water standing in the street and no lights and windows broke and boats all up in the town and trees blwon down and everything all blown and I go a skiff and went out and found my boat where I had her inside Mango Bay and she was alright only she was full of water." ~ James Joyce, Finnegands Wake

Anthimeria

-"I'll unhair thy head." ~ William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra -"Me, dictionary-ing heavily, "Where was the one they were watching?" ~ Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa -"The thunger would not peace my bidding." ~ William Shakespeare, King Lear -"Who are you texting?"

Hyperbole

-"I'm so hungry; I'd give my first-born child for a slice fo that pizza." -"People moved slowly then. There was no hurry, for t here was nowhere to go, nothing to buy, and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb Count." ~ Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird -"There did not seem to be brains enough in the entire nursery, so to speak, to bait a fishhook with," ~ Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Allusion

-"If you love a lot, you lie a lot/ Guess they did in Camelot" ~ Tori Amos, "Jackie's Strength" (Alluding to JFK's affair with Marilyn Monroe" -Santha Rama Rau entitled her autobiographical story about the painful memory of a teacher who replaced her name with an English name "By Any Other Name" (an ironic allusion to Shakespeare's Juliet, who claims that names are not important, since "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet") -"But they tortured and burned you/ They beat and they tied you/ They left you cold and breathing/ For love they crucified you... This shsa Etheridge, "Scarecrow" (alluding to both the lynching of the Matthew Shepard and the crucifixion of Jesus Christ)

Simile

-"In the morning the dust hung like fog, and the sun was as red as ripe new blood." ~ John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath -"Old friends are like meats served up repeatedly, cold, comfortless, and distasteful. The stomach turns against them." ~ William Hazlitt -"Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep." ~ Carl Sandburg

Climax

-"Lost, vaded, broken, dead within an hour." ~ William Shakespeare, The Passionate Pilgrim -"I think we've reached a point of great decision, not just for our nation, not only for all humanity, but for life upon this earth." ~ George Wald, A Generation in Search of a Future -"Nothing has been left undone to crippled their minds, debase their moral stature, obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind." ~ Lloyd Garrison, Narrative of the Life of an American Slave

Anaphora

-"Mad world! Mad kings! Mad composition!" ~ William Shakespeare, King John -"We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans." ~ Winston Churchill -"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven time sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my sould and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God himself. Never." ~ Ellie Wiesel, Night

Oxymoron

-"O miserable abundance. O beggarly riches!" ~ John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions -"I must be cruel only to be kind." ~ Shakespeare, Hamlet -"O brawling love! O loving hate! ... O heavy lightness! serious vanity! Misshapen chaos of well-seeing forms! Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health! Srill-waking sleep, that is not what it is! This love feel I, that feel no love in this." ~ William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Synecdoche

-"The U.S. won three gold medals." -"Take thy face hence." ~ William Shakespeare, Macbeth -"The hired hands are not doing their jobs."

Assonance

-"The lady waits in the place of her favorite angel" -"From the molten-golden notes.." ~ Edgar Allen Poe, "The Bells" -"He hung a grunting weight." ~ Elizabeth Bishop, "The Fish"

Apposition

-"This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat." ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby -"Miniver Cheevy, a child of scorn, grew lean while he assailed the seasons." ~ E.A. Robinson, "Miniver Cheevy -"There was snow in the air, buoyant motes, play things that seethed and floated like the toy flakes inside a crystal." ~ Truman Capote, The Muses are Heard

Asyndeton

-"We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hadships, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." ~ JFK, Inaugural -"But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground." Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address -"When we listen to the better angels of our nature, we find that they celebrate the simple things, the basica things-- such as goodness, decency, love, kindness." ~ Richard Nixon

Paradox

-"What a pity that youth must be wasted on the young." ~ George Bernard Shaw -"When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight." ~ Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet -"Freedom is not doing what you want; freedom is wanting what you do what you have to do.. this kind of freedom is always rooted in practiced habit." ~ Northrop Frye

Parallelism

-I try to buy clothes that are versatile, reasonably priced, stylish enough that I don't look dated, and professional without being prudish. -Before she left, she put the dishes in the dishwasher, wiped the counter, and took several bags of trash out to the dumpster. -Regardless of whether they are in a stew, beside a slab of Grandma's famous meatloaf, or atop a garden salad, I simply cannot stand the sight of carrots

Verbal Irony

-In Clue, a policeman sees a corpse but believes he is seeing a man who is passed out, having drunk too much alcohol. He says the man i "dead drunk," to which Mrs. Scarlet replies, "Dead right." Prof. PLum then assures the policeman that the man will not be driving home. -Also in Clue, when asked what her husband does for a living, Mrs. White raplies that he just "lies around on his back all day" (later we learn that he is dead)

Situational Irony

-In Shakespeare's Othello, the very handkerchief Iago thought would allow him to become lieutenant and bring Cassio to ruins was the handkerchief that brought Iago to ruins and exalted Cassio even higher than his position of lieutenant. -When John Hinkely attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, all of his shots initially missed the President; however a bullet ricocheted off the bullet-proof windows of the Presidentail limousine and struck Reagan in the chest. Thusm the windows made to protect the President from gunfire were partially responsible for his being shot.

Dramatic Irony

-In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the audience knows that Juliet is in a drugged death-like sleep, but Romeo assumes her to be dead and kills himself. -In The Truman Show, the audience knows that Truman's life is a facade, but he believes it to be real