| consonance | | "The wind whispered through the trees." |
| climax | | The excessive use of conjuctions to "slow the pace." |
| onomatopoeia | | "A good pun is its own re-word." |
| alliteration | | Are you leaving out a word because it is already implied by the context of the words around it? Try this rhetorical strategy. |
| Ellipsis | | In this rhetorical strategy, words are repeated at the begining of successive clauses. |
| paradox | | "Then the decurion and his troopers herded their prisoner back...." -Patrick Larkin, The Tribune (169) |
| Periodic | | "Why are you such an idiot?" |
| epanalepsis | | A statement that has some truth, but seems to contradict itself. |
| chiasmus | | Using the words "Capitol Hill" instead of the word "government." |
| apposition | | Grammatical structure of the first clause, is reversed to create the second. |
| Anthimeria | | A clearly expressed comparison, recognized by the use of Like or as. |
| Irony | | most commonly known as the usage of a noun as a verb. |
| synecdoche | | When one word describes two or more nouns, but the word is written only once. Think implied meaning. |
| Polyptoton | | The reptition of similar consonant sounds at the middle or ends of words. |
| oxymoron | | Antanaclasis is a type of this. |
| Parenthesis | | Arranging ideas in order of importance. |
| euphemism | | The absence of conjuctions between phrases. Opposite of polysyndenton |
| hyperbole | | "Sparkles, my cat, coughed up a hairball." |
| antithesis | | Common forms of this are Situational, Cosmic, and Dramatic. |
| Paronomasia | | "I loved his eyes(the extent to which he loved could be argued) and his hair." |
| Antimetabole | | Isocolon is a type of this. |
| zeugma | | Repetition of vowel sounds within words. |
| pun | | "She loved her cake, her cake was her life, her life was her hell, and her hell was her freedom." |
| anastrophe | | "Nothing will come of nothing." -Shakespeare's King Lear |
| asyndenton | | "Sanitation Engineer" |
| Anadiplosis | | This strengthens an idea with underexaggeration. Think Chandler from friends. |
| parallelism | | The opposite of anaphora. |
| polysyndenton | | "Jumbo Shrimp." |
| litotes | | Words from the same root are repeated, but in different senses. |
| personification | | Opposite of litotes. |
| Loose | | Substituting a descriptive word for a proper name. |
| Simile | | A comparison between two unlike things. By the way, the comparison is implied. |
| Antanaclasis | | This is when opposite ideas are stated together to show contrast. |
| Apostrophe | | The repetition of the same sound at the beginning of each word. |
| anaphora | | "A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch And blue spurt of a lighted match." -Browning's Meeting At Night |
| metonymy | | "God, why do you mock me so?" |
| epistrophe | | This type of sentence ends with a dependent clause and begins with an independent clause and the main idea. |
| Periphrasis | | Everyone should fight to live, not live to fight. |
| isocolon | | In greek, this means a "turning back" and deals with word order. |
| metaphor | | "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana." -Groucho Marx |
| assonance | | Parallelism in which several successive phrases contain the same amount of words and sometimes syllables. |
| Rhetoricalquestion | | The main idea is at the end of this type of sentence. |