Aristotle taught that a speaker's ability to persuade an audience is based on how well the speaker appeals to that audience in three different areas: logos, ethos, and pathos. Considered together, these appeals form what later rhetoricians have called the rhetorical triangle.
Introduction
You utilise rhetoric whenever you create an argumentative essay, a persuasive essay, or talking points for a discussion. The arguments you make in your writing are supported by rhetoric, even if you aren't familiar with the phrase. The language you employ in your writing to convey the main idea is known as rhetoric.
Rhetoric devices
Rhetoric in types of writing like narrative writing and poetry often relies on linguistic tools like figurative language and well-known figures of speech. These tools are known as rhetorical devices. Through a rhetorical device, you can make your argument feel more pressing, make it stick in listeners’ and/or readers’ minds, enable them to empathize with you or your characters, and drive them to think differently about the issue you’re presenting.
There are lots of different rhetorical devices you can employ in your writing. Here are a few common ones:
Hyperbole
Hyperbole is an extreme exaggeration meant to highlight the issue presented:
“I deal with thousands of angry customers every day.”
With hyperbole, both the speaker and the listener know it’s an exaggeration. The goal is to demonstrate how an issue compares to the norm or to other issues by positioning it as wildly outside the norm.
Meiosis
The reverse of hyperbole, meiosis emphasizes how far outside the norm an issue is through extreme understatement:
“Compared to others in the area, our school was empty.”
Epistrophe
Epistrophe is the repetition of a word through successive phrases, clauses, or sentences for the purpose of emphasizing it as a concept. Typically, parallelism is employed to underscore this repetition and give the speech a poetic quality. Abraham Lincoln used epistrophe in this famous excerpt from the Gettysburg Address:
“. . . government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Metaphor
Metaphor is a type of figurative language that compares two topics by claiming that one literally is the other:
“My mother’s cooking is heaven on earth.”
Conclusion
Rhetoric appears in a variety of writing styles, including academic writing and the ones we've already discussed. The usage of rhetoric relies on the sort of writing you're doing and the message you're trying to convey. Rhetoric can be found in just about any type of writing. You can also download our app from the playstore or visit our website.
