Figures of Speech Quiz

Rhetorical Modes

• Interrogation: a rhetorical mode used to affirm or deny something strongly, often used in rhetorical questions.

Figures of Speech

Types of Figures of Speech

• Exclamation: used for strong expression of feelings, e.g., "O lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud I fall upon the thorns of life; I bleed!"
• Climax: an arrangement of ideas in order of increasing importance, e.g., "What a piece of work man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties! In action, how like an angel!"
• Anticlimax (Bathos): a ludicrous descent from the higher to the lower, e.g., "a man so various, that he seemed to be. Not one, but all mankind's epitome; who in the course of one revolving moon; was lawyer, statesman, fiddler, and buffoon."

Figures of Speech Examples

• Alliteration: repetition of the same letter or syllable at the beginning of two or more words, e.g., "By apt Alliteration's artful aid Glittering through the gloomy gas"
• Onomatopoeia: words that imitate sounds, e.g., "cuckoo", "bang", "growl", "hiss"
• Apostrophe: direct address to an inanimate thing or abstract idea as if it were a living person or an absent person as if present, e.g., "Boy's mother loved him very much."
• Hyperbole: an emphatic statement made by overstatement, e.g., "Virtues as the sands of the shore."
• Synecdoche: understanding one thing by means of another, e.g., "I have the Viceroy, love the man." and "All hands (crew) at work."
• Transferred Epithets: qualifying objective transferred from a person to a thing, e.g., "sleepless night", "sunburn mirth", and "melodious plain".
• Euphemism: speaking in agreeable terms of something unpleasant, e.g., "He is telling us a fairy tale" (a lie) and "He has fallen asleep" (he is dead).
• Irony or Sarcasm: real meaning of words is different from the intended meaning.

Other Figures of Speech

• Simile: explicitly comparing two unlike things, e.g., "She is like a fairy".
• Metaphor: an informal or implied simile, e.g., "He is a lion".
• Personification: attributing personal nature, intelligence or character to inanimate objects or abstract notions, e.g., "the furious storm", "the thirsty ground", and "the pitiless cold".
• Metonymy: a change of name.