Chan – AP English Lang. & Comp. 2016-17
Rhetorical Terms Assignment
You will be given a 9-page handout titled Rhetorical Terms/Devices. It includes 60 terms you should know fairly well by the time you finish this course. You aren’t learning these terms so you can “throw them around” and create pedantic writing; rather, you are learning these terms so you can recognize them when analyzing others’ writing and use them for effect in your own.
Over the next few weeks, we will work on creating five (5) examples for each term.
The Particulars
Once each week, we will spend time in class talking about and looking at examples of the rhetorical terms, and then creating our own examples for five (5) terms on the list.
You can create flash cards or have a special place in your notebook for these. Your entry should include:
The word
Its definition, which you should put into your own (accurate) words.
Five numbered examples created by you.
An explanation of the possible stylistic/rhetorical uses/effects of the term.
I will randomly check these for points while you’re working on the five new terms, so be sure to have the previous week’s five words completed and with you every Monday. We will also have quizzes on these words.
Example ~ What you hand in to me should look precisely like this:
1. Anastrophe
An inversion of normal word order.
1. "It comes whether we like it or not, the first day of school."
2. "And this matters to me why?”
3. “I chocolate like!”
4. “Excited much, the students said they couldn’t wait for the quiz.”
5. “We rejoiced when after another year of school came the summer.”
Uses: By placing certain words and phrases out of the ordinary syntactical order of a sentence, the reader’s attention is purposefully drawn to those words and phrases. Because it confuses a bit, frequently even requiring a re-reading of the sentence, it makes the reader take stronger notice of those words and phrases the anastrophe emphasizes.