Stylistic Devices & Language

1. Stylistic Devices & Language Adding Some Zing

2. Remember from Before… • Listener interest • Listener retention • Adapting to the audience • Sensitivity to different identities • Augmenting delivery

3. Language Choices • Language’s power • In the beginning there was… • Denotation vs. connotation (H. p. 265-268) • Be appropriate to (H. 281-287): • Context • Topic • Audience expectations and identities • For example, gender-inclusion • Speaker identity and ethics

4. Use Don’t (over)Use • Accurate • Clear • Simple/Concise • Familiar • Concrete • Specific/Precise • See Hogan 268-275 • Jargon • “Scale” • Abbreviations/acronyms • MMORPG • Clichés • Too many cooks in the kitchen… • Modifiers • Likely, generally, sometimes

5. Stylistic Devices/Figures • Engages audience interest • Crafts mental pictures • Increases persuasion • Makes more memorable • Emphasizes important points • Can combine devices • No fear here – it’s NOT awkward!

6. Metaphor • Definition: implied comparison achieved through a figurative use of words; a word is used not in its literal sense, but in one analogous to it. The two things are of unlike nature yet have something in common. • Example: But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. -- Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream” • Example: My heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill. -- William Sharp, The Lonely Hunter

7. Image from Dinosaur Comics, at Qwantz.com

8. Conceptual Metaphors Life/Journey Violent Metaphors Shoot (meaning: talk) Dying to War on Poverty Shot down (love, argument) Battle for Bombshell (for pretty) Cut like a knife Come charging in • Going places • Getting a head start • Being at a crossroads Desire/Fire • Burning with desire • Warming up to someone • Looking hot

9. Metaphor Practice: • Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food. -- Austin O'Malley • Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.  -- Matt Groening • Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,That struts and frets his hour upon the stage. -- Shakespeare, Macbeth • From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. -- Winston Churchill

10. Simile • Defined: A comparison between two things that are not alike but have similarities. Unlike metaphors, similes employ like or as. • Example: He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food. -- Raymond Chandler • Example: The harpsichord sounds like two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin roof. -- Sir Thomas Beecham

11. Simile Practice • Her eyes are as blue as a robin's egg. • Let us go then, you and I,While the evening is spread out against the sky,Like a patient etherized upon a table... -- T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock • Memories strike home, like slaps in the face;  Raised on elbow, I stare at the pale fog beyond the window.  So many things I had thought forgotten Return to my mind with stranger pain:   Like letters that arrive addressed to someone  Who left the house so many years ago.-- Philip Larkin, Why Did I Dream of You Last Night?

12. Synecdoche • Defined: the use of a part for the whole, or the whole for the part • Example: Give us this day our daily bread. -- Bible, Matthew 6 • Example: England won three gold medals.

13. Synecdoche Practice • Tom just bought a fancy new set of wheels. • I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. -- T. S. Eliot's the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock • All hands on deck.Take thy face hence. -- Shakespeare, Macbeth V.iii

14. Syllepsis • Defined: use of a word with two others, with each understood differently, applying the same single word to convey multiple meanings • Example: We must all hang together or assuredly we will all hang separately. -- Benjamin Franklin • Example: His boat and his dreams sank.

15. Syllepsis Practice • You held your breath and the door for me — Alanis Morissette • Fix the problem, not the blame. — Dave Weinbaum • He lost the bet and his temper. • Bryant Gumble's well-publicized memo ticked off the Today show's troubles -- and other personalities on the top-rated show.

16. Alliteration • Defined: repetition of the same sound beginning several words in sequence. • Example: Calvin Klein • Example: Best Buy • Example: Let us go forth to lead the land we love. -- J. F. Kennedy, Inaugural

17. Alliteration Practice • Veni, vidi, vici. -- Julius Caesar • Lady lounges luxuriously • Dark deep dread • Father is rather vulgar, my dear.  The word Papa, besides, gives a pretty form to the lips.  Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism, are all very good words for the lips: especially prunes and prism. -- Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

18. Chiasmus • Defined: Repetition of words, in successive clauses, in reverse grammatical order and/or the reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses. • Example: Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. -- John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Your Country Subject You Object Your Country Subject You Object

19. Chiasmus Practice • Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good. -- Samuel Johnson • Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things. • Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.-- George W. Bush • I flee who chases me, and chases who flees me. Ovid • Fair is foul, and foul is fair. -- Shakespeare, Macbeth I.i • If black men have no rights in the eyes of the white men, of course the whites can have none in the eyes of the blacks. -- Frederick Douglass, An Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage

20. Parallelism • Repetition of words/phrases at either the beginning (anaphora) or end of a phrase (epistrophe) • Similar endings of adjacent or parallel words (homioteuleton)

21. Anaphora Example • We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender. -- Winston Churchill

22. Anaphora Practice • I'm not afraid to die.  .  .  . I'm not afraid to live.   I'm not afraid to fail.  I'm not afraid to succeed. I'm not afraid to fall in love.  I'm not afraid to be alone.  I'm just afraid I might have to stop talking about myself for five minutes. -- Kinky Friedman, When the Cat's Away • I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. -- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, part 32

23. Epistrophe • Example: What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny compared to what lies within us. — Ralph Waldo Emerson • Example: We are born to sorrow, pass our time in sorrow, end our days in sorrow. • Practice: Take whatever idiot they have at the top of whatever agency and give me a better idiot.  Give me a caring idiot.  Give me a sensitive idiot.  Just don’t give me the same idiot.  -- Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson Parish near New Orleans, speaking to CBS about FEMA Chief Michael Brown on Sep. 6, 2005

24. Homioteuleton • Example: He is esteemed eloquent which can invent wittily, remember perfectly, dispose orderly, figure diversly [sic], pronounce aptly, confirm strongly, and conclude directly -- Peacham • Practice: My mother weeping, my father wailing, my sister crying, our maid howling, our cat wringing her hands. -- Shakespeare, The Two Gentleman of Verona

25. Paraprosdokian • Defined: surprise or unexpected ending of a phrase or series • Example: It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. -- Winston Churchill • Example: Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. — Groucho Marx

26. Paraprosdokian Practice • Where there's a will, I want to be in it. • I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my father, not screaming and terrified like his passengers. — Bob Monkhouse • I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat. — Will Rogers • I haven't slept for ten days, because that would be too long. — Mitch Hedberg

27. Putting it all together… Some extended examples

28. Alliteration Alliteration Harriet. Harr-i-ette. Hard-hearted harbinger of haggis. Beautiful, bemused, bellicose butcher. Un-trust... ing. Un-know... ing. Un-love... ed? "He wants you back," he screamed into the night air like a firefighter going to a window that has no fire... except the passion of his heart. I am lonely. It's really hard. This poem... sucks. Homioteuleton Anaphora Paraprosdokian Simile Metaphor

29. And still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees, When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas, When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor, A highwayman comes riding Riding riding A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn door. -- Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman