Rhetorical devices come in handy when you’re trying to emphasize ideas (logos) or evoke specific emotions (pathos) in your reader. Using carefully crafted sentences, you can write in a way that persuades your reader to think or feel a certain way.
We’re mostly concerned with pathos in writing fiction. Your scenes and sentences all work together toward the goal of conveying the emotion of your characters and eliciting emotion from your reader.
You’re probably familiar with these rhetorical devices already, but you may not have known what they were. Using these devices will add emotion and emphasis to your scenes, and help your characters pop off the page.
Four rhetorical devices to give your prose more power
Here are four different rhetorical devices. The examples are from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling (of course, because I love Harry Potter!).
- Asyndeton – omitting conjunctions in a list of three or more.
ex. “It was stupid, pointless, irritating beyond belief that he still had four days left of being unable to perform magic…” - Alliteration – repeating initial consonant sounds, either adjacently to each other or spread out in a sentence or across several sentences.
ex. “Harry felt that nothing but action would assuage his feelings of guilt and grief and that he ought to set out on his mission to find and destroy Horcruxes as soon as possible.” - Anaphora – repeating a word or phrase at the beginning of three (or more) successive phrases or sentences.
ex. “Was the man he sought down there, the man he needed so badly he could think of little else, the man who held the answer, the answer to his problem…?” - Andadiplosis – repeating the last word of one sentence or clause at the beginning of the next sentence or clause.
ex. “Was the man he sought down there, the man he needed so badly he could think of little else, the man who held the answer, the answer to his problem…?”
These are just four of many different types of rhetorical devices. We’ll go over other types in the coming weeks.
Rhetoric is a natural part of how we communicate our passion and our ideas with others. You may already use some rhetorical devices without even realizing what you’re doing.
Learning to recognize rhetorical devices in other works that you read will help you better analyze and discuss them. And taking the time to identify and then intentionally employ these devices in your writing will help you become a more effective and eloquent writer.