In the modern world where the town square is a digital place and the zeitgeist is a worldwide phenomenon, we don’t practice rhetoric like we used to. Still, the art of rhetoric is a key part of writing great works and even mediocre ones.
In this article, I will go over two main categories of rhetorical devices: auditory and argumentative, and I’ll offer you a Story Weapon to explore the arguments within your own story and give them weight and meaning.
Rhetorical devices are techniques used to persuade through sound, structure, logic, or emotion. They shape how arguments land on the page or the stage. This piece explains major types of rhetorical devices, from musical auditory tools to logical argumentative ones, and shows how they help writers craft compelling, persuasive stories and speeches.
What is a rhetorical device?
Rhetorical devices are techniques used in a piece of writing or oratory designed to persuade.
Think of rhetoric as particularly close to argument and rhetorical devices as the way that argument is made, whereas literary devices serve to help structure the imagination of a reader in works of literature.
How do we encounter rhetoric today?
You might be writing a scene in which there is a speech, a diatribe, perhaps a closing argument for a courtroom, or a monologue from a heroic figure or villain. Rhetoric is found often in works for the stage and screen. To understand rhetorical devices that are available to us, let’s think of them in two main categories.
“The arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding.”
– Immanuel Kant
Auditory devices
Rhetoric comes directly from a lineage of thinkers and orators who made their arguments loudly and in public.
This tradition includes the famous debate in 63 BC on the Senate floor in Rome, where Gaius Caesar and Cato the Elder argued the merits of the death penalty. It evolved further with the Valladolid Debate in 1550, where Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas argued for the rights of indigenous people to practice human sacrifice and scholar Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda contended that the brutal encomienda system was an acceptable price to pay to end such practices. We might also include the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which drew enormous crowds at the time as a public spectacle of thought.
Considering that oratory is a major aspect of rhetoric, and it will most likely show up in your work as dialogue, many rhetorical devices are associated with how the sentences sound when spoken.
Words that sound like music make them worth listening to, and an audience becomes much more receptive to the message when the messenger delivers it well.
Here’s a list of various auditory devices used in rhetoric:
- The most popular of these techniques is alliteration, which Webster’s describes as “the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent of closely connected words.”
- Then there’s cacophony, adding discordant and jarring sounds to a speech, and its prettier sibling euphony, which is all that melodious prose.
- There’s anaphora, which is the repetition of a word at the beginning of successive phrases. In the Roman spirit, that looks like “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem Ulysses ends with the anaphora: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
- Anaphora is paired with epistrophe, the repetition of a word at the end of successive phrases. Epistrophe is a particular favorite of John Steinbeck, who uses it like this in Grapes of Wrath: “The big sycamore by the creek was gone. The willow tangle was gone. The little enclave of untrodden bluegrass was gone. The clump of dogwood on the little rise across the creek-now that, too, was gone.”
- Last, but not least, among the auditory rhetoric devices is antimetabole, the art of mirroring a phrase in itself. You’ve heard this in the form of “Don’t let a fool kiss you, and don’t let a kiss fool you.” Or “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Like harmony in singing, these sounds please the ears and the mind.
Argumentative devices
The other type of rhetorical devices are those that focus not on the packaging of the message — how it sounds — but on the logical argument being made. Here are a few of those:
- Chiasmus focuses more on the inversion of the idea than the inversion of the sentence structure. From Samuel Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes: “By day the frolic, and the dance by night” and the Mexican luminary Emiliano Zapata: “I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.” Chiasmus is a wonderful way to draw distinctions between the two positions presented; the contrast is stark when they’re placed next to each other.
- The first of a triad, ethos is an appeal to the credibility of the speaker. Why should the townspeople believe the captain when he says the ship is fit to go out to sea? Because he’s been a captain for thirty years! There’s some authority there.
- The second of the triad is pathos, the appeal to emotion. To sway the people, your character has to win their heart. Any half-decent performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar has the audience choked up when Marc Antony says of the slain Caesar: “You all did love him once, not without cause: What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him? O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts, And men have lost their reason. Bear with me; My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, And I must pause till it come back to me.”
- The third in the triad is logos, the appeal to logic. Win the people’s hearts and convince their minds, and any argument will be won. We see this in our courtroom scenes, like the brilliant climax in Legally Blonde. Elle Woods cross examines Chutney Windham and reasons: “Isn’t the first cardinal rule of perm maintenance that you are forbidden to wet your hair for at least twenty-four hours after getting a perm at the risk of de-activating the ammonium thiglycolate? And if you, in fact, were not washing your hair, as I suspect you were not, since your curls are still intact, wouldn’t you have heard the gunshot?”
- We often hear hyperbole in the world of politics, which is an over-exaggeration of a point to inflame the passions of the audience. It’s never just an election: there’s freedom at stake. The new candidate (liberal or conservative) doesn’t want your vote to get them into office, they need your support to save democracy.
Naturally, there are many more devices that might be thought of as rhetorical devices. We all use metaphors and similes when we speak and when we write, making them both literary devices and rhetorical devices. Onomatopoeia, oxymorons, parallel structures, irony — the list goes on!
Your story weapon: Play out both sides of an argument
Although it might sound dry . . . story is an argument. And your job, as a storyteller, is to explore both sides of the argument with equal integrity.
When you recognize that your characters are functions of this dramatic question (or argument), you begin to see that the dramatic situation exists solely to explore the argument. The thing to remember is that both sides (protagonist and antagonists) all have very good points. This is necessarily so, because while the argument might begin with the question of who will win and who will lose, the goal for any well-told story is to dramatize a transformation by reframing the relationship to the argument.
Writing Exercise
Write a stream of consciousness dialogue between your protagonist and an antagonist, and explore how they are both desperate to get what they want. Make the stakes high. Make them life and death, in that if they don’t get what they want their lives will be unimaginable.
This does not mean that the characters are enemies. They could be madly in love, for example, and they could both want to get married, but he might want to run away with her to Bali, while she wants them to stay in Akron.
As always, let the list of devices presented here be an exciting addition to your writer’s toolbox. Cultivating a sense of freedom and lack of expectation is key. There are so many wonderful pieces of rhetoric that are purely “logos” or use only similes. And then there are many that use them all.
Use these as a resource and see if you can’t convince yourself of both sides of your characters’ arguments. If you can do that, your readers will be enthralled!
Are you stuck trying to work out the motivations behind your protagonist and antagonist(s)? Come join one of my workshops: The 90-Day Novel, The 90-Day Memoir, Story Day
