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For example, if the writer wanted to rewrite the above examples, he could write: Bells rang. Their resonance filled the air with clangor, startling pigeons into flight from every belfry. Upon hearing the sounds, the townspeople rushed into the streets. They all stood in silence and awaited the news. She drove to the movies.
Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
In rhetoric, a rhetorical device, persuasive device, or stylistic device is a technique that an author or speaker uses to convey to the listener or reader a meaning with the goal of persuading them towards considering a topic from a perspective, using language designed to encourage or provoke an emotional display of a given perspective or action.
Repetition is the simple repeating of a word, within a short space of words (including in a poem), with no particular placement of the words to secure emphasis.It is a multilinguistic written or spoken device, frequently used in English and several other languages, such as Hindi and Chinese, and so rarely termed a figure of speech.
In English literature, Jane Austen provides perhaps the finest examples of periodic sentences. The opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice - "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife" - pierces to the heart of Mrs Bennet's character as well as the very difficult social ...
The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms offers a much broader definition for zeugma by defining it as any case of parallelism and ellipsis working together so that a single word governs two or more parts of a sentence. [17] Vicit pudorem libido timorem audacia rationem amentia. (Cicero, Pro Cluentio, VI.15)
The often-cited first sentence of this work is: "Ὁ βίος βραχύς, δὲ τέχνη μακρή" – "life is short, art is long", usually reversed in order (Ars longa, vita brevis). This aphorism was later applied or adapted to physical science and then morphed into multifarious aphorisms of philosophy, morality, and literature.
For example, the phrase, "John, my best friend" uses the scheme known as apposition. Tropes (from Greek trepein, 'to turn') change the general meaning of words. An example of a trope is irony, which is the use of words to convey the opposite of their usual meaning ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men").