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In some types of writing, repeated use of said is considered tedious, and writers are encouraged to employ synonyms. On Wikipedia, it is more important to avoid language that makes undue implications. Said, stated, described, wrote, commented, and according to are almost always neutral and accurate.
In English essay first meant "a trial" or "an attempt", and this is still an alternative meaning. The Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was the first author to describe his work as essays; he used the term to characterize these as "attempts" to put his thoughts into writing. Subsequently, essay has been defined in a variety of ways.
Contrast is the antonym of simile. In poetic compositions, it is common for poets to set out an elaborate contrast or elaborate simile as the argument. For example, John Donne and the metaphysical poets developed the conceit as a literary device, where an elaborate, implausible, and surprising analogy was demonstrated.
This contrasts with an idiom, where the meaning of the whole cannot be inferred from its parts, and may be completely unrelated. There are about seven main types of collocations: adjective + noun, noun + noun (such as collective nouns ), noun + verb, verb + noun, adverb + adjective, verbs + prepositional phrase ( phrasal verbs ), and verb + adverb.
Contrast is often overtly marked by markers such as but or however, such as in the following examples: It's raining, but I am not taking an umbrella. We will be giving a party for our new students. We won't, however, be serving drinks. The student knew about the test on Friday, but still he did not study.
This is where contrastive rhetoric overlaps with social constructionism, which sees approaches to textual meaning as dynamic, socio-cognitive activities. Instead of analyzing what texts "mean", the interest is to understand how they construct meaning. Bazerman and Prior (2004, p. 6) pose three questions to guide the analysis of writing:
Contrastivism, or the contrast theory of meaning, is an epistemological theory proposed by Jonathan Schaffer that suggests that knowledge attributions have a ternary structure of the form 'S knows that p rather than q'. This is in contrast to the traditional view whereby knowledge attributions have a binary structure of the form 'S knows that p'.
Componential analysis is a method typical of structural semantics which analyzes the components of a word's meaning. Thus, it reveals the culturally important features by which speakers of the language distinguish different words in a semantic field or domain (Ottenheimer, 2006, p. 20).