Rhetorical Terms - Scheme

alliteration - The repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning or in the middle of two or more adjacent words.
Ex: "To make a man to meet the moral need/ A man to match the mountains and the sea" (Edwin Markham)

anadiplosis - The repetition of the last word of one clause at the beginning of the following clause.
Ex: "Men in great place are thrice servants: servants of the sovereign or state; servants of fame; and servants of business." (Francis Bacon)

anaphora - The repetition of a group of words at the beginning of successive clauses.
Ex: "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, we shall fight with growing confidence…" (Winston Churchill)

antecedent-consequence relationship - The relationship expressed by "if…then" reasoning.
Ex: If industries poison rivers with pollutants, then many fish will die.

anthimeria - The substitution of one part of speech for another.
Ex: "The thunder would not peace at my bidding." (William Shakespeare)

appeal - One of three strategies for persuading audiences--logos, appeal to reason; pathos, appeal to emotion; and ethos, appeal to ethics.
Ex: "I elicited the anger of some of the most aggressive teenagers in my high school.  A couple of nights later, a car pulled up in front of my house, and the angry teenagers in the car dumped garbage on the lawn of my house as an act of revenge and intimidation." (James Garbarino)

appositive - A noun or noun phrase that follows another noun immediately or defines or amplifies its meaning.
Ex: Orion, my orange cat, is sitting on the couch.

argument - A carefully constructed, well-supported representation of how a writer sees an issue, problem, or subject.
Ex: The Patriots prevailed over the Loyalists, who they violently persecuted due to their conflicting position; both betrayed the African slaves to temporarily bolster their military.

Aristotelian triangle - A diagram showing the relations of writer or speaker, audience (reader or listener), and text in a rhetorical situation.

canon - One of the traditional elements of rhetorical composition -- invention, arrangement, style, memory, or delivery.
Ex: Frederick Douglass's style (one aspect of canon) is both objective and subjective.

casuistry - A mental exercise to discover possibilities for analysis of communication.

dramatic narration - A narrative in which the reader or viewer does not have access to the unspoken thoughts of any character.

dynamic character - One who changes during the course of the narrative.
Ex: Romeo is a dramatic character in Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare.

evidence - The facts, statistics, anecdotes, and examples that  a speaker or writer offers in support of a claim, generalization, or conclusion.
Ex: "Recent studies in the brain chemistry of rats show that when they play, their brains release large amounts of dopamine . . ." (Rifkin).

metonymy - An entity referred to by one of its attributes or associations.
Ex: "The press" for the news media.

symbol - In a text, an element that stands for more than itself and, therefore, helps to convey a theme of the text.
Ex: Purple symbolizes royalty.

East Egg in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald symbolizes the ""old rich."""

tautology - A group of words that merely repeats the meaning already conveyed.
Ex: "If you don't get any better, then you'll never improve."

thesis - The main idea in a text, often the main generalization, conclusion, or claim.
Ex: The corruption of America's rich in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

thesis statement - A single sentence that states a text's thesis, usually somewhere near the beginning.
Ex: "Sweatt v. Painter advanced equality by ultimately improving African American educational rights, thus transforming American democracy for a better today."

topic - A place where writers go to discover methods for proof and strategies for presentation of ideas.
Ex: Gun control laws, the environment, or communism.

trope - An artful variation from expected modes of expression of thoughts and ideas.
Ex: Pun or metonymy.

voice - The textual features, such as diction and sentence structure, that convey a writer's or speaker's persona.
Ex: F. Scott Fitzgerald's voice is made up of mystery.

writing process - The acts a writer goes through, often recursively, to complete a piece of writing: inventing, investigating, planning, drafting, consulting, revising, and editing.
Ex: I used this to write my research paper.