The use of hints and suggestions to offer clues to future developments in a work.
What is foreshadowing?
100
The repetition of a phonetic sound at the beginning of several words in a sentence.
What is alliteration?
100
An overexaggeration that bolsters an argument.
What is hyperbole?
100
An appeal to the audience's emotion.
What is pathos?
100
The word "to" plus a verb, used as a noun, adjective, or adverb.
What is an infinitive?
200
The dictionary definition of a word.
What is denotation?
200
The deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several successive sentences/clauses.
What is anaphora?
200
The deliberate omission of conjunctions from a series of related independent clauses to create a tight, concise, and forceful sentence.
What is asyndeton?
200
The "everyone is doing it" argument.
What is bandwagon?
200
A verbal that is used as an adjective.
What is a participle?
300
Language that is overly rhetorical/pompous, especially when considered in context.
What is bombast?
300
Repetition of words at both the beginning and the end of a phrase.
What is symploce?
300
A prayer-like direct address to someone who is not present, to a deity, or to some other power.
What is apostrophe?
300
An argument that distracts the reader by raising issues irrelevant to the case.
What is red herring?
300
A pattern of language that creates a rhythm of repetition through a balance within one or more sentences/phrases/clauses that have the same grammatical structure.
What is parallelism/parallel structure?
400
When a subject is portrayed in a deliberately distorted way in order to critique the subject and to achieve a comic effect.
What is satire?
400
Ending a series of lines, phrases, clauses, or sentences with the same word or words.
What is epsitrophe?
400
Mixing one type of sensory input with another in an impossible way (how a smell looks. how a color sounds. etc.)
What is synesthesia?
400
When a person engaging in an argument defines his opponent's position in a way that is easy to attack when the opponent is not present.
What is straw man?
400
A sentence with several dependent clauses that precede the independent clause.
What is a periodic sentence?
500
A form of word play in which one word is mistakenly substituted for another that sounds similar.
What is malapropism?
500
When the last word of one clause begins the next clause, creating a connection of ideas.
What is anadiplosis?
500
A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole.
What is synecdoche?
500
An attack on the person rather than on the issues at hand.
What is ad hominem?
500
An independent clause followed by all sorts of debris, usually dependent clauses.