AP Rhetorical Devices

1. AP Rhetorical Devices (Terms from practice exam)

2. MasculineRhyme – in poetry, a monosyllabic rhyme or a rhyme that occurs only in stressed final syllables (such as claims, flames or rare, despair).

3. Anachronism Neglect or falsification, intentional or not, of chronological relation. It is most frequently found in works of imagination that rest on a historical basis, in which appear details borrowed from a later age; Artists tended to represent characters in terms of their own nationality and time e.g., a clock in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, an attendant to the Pharaoh shod in tennis shoes in Cecil B. deMille’sThe Ten Commandments. Anachronisms originate in disregard of the different modes of life and thought that characterize different periods or in ignorance of the facts of history.

4. Apostrophe a rhetorical device by which a speaker turns from the audience as a whole to address a single person or thing.

5. Asyndeton the omission of the conjunctions that ordinarily join coordinate words or clauses, as in the phrase “I came, I saw, I conquered”

6. Anaphora (Greek: “a carrying up or back”), a literary or oratorical device involving the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several sentences or clauses

7. Panegyric eulogistic oration or laudatory discourse that originally was a speech delivered at an ancient Greek general assembly (panegyris), such as the Olympic and Panathenaic festival

8. Polysyndeton A rhetorical term for a sentence style that employs many coordinating conjunctions (the opposite of asyndeton).

9. Feminine Rhyme (also called double rhyme) in poetry, a rhyme involving two syllables (as in motion and ocean or willow and billow). The term feminine rhyme is also sometimes applied to triple rhymes, or rhymes involving three syllables (such as exciting and inviting).