EXERCISE: Six Rhetorical Devices and 13 Examples?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Originally posted 21 March 2007

An exercise. You may remember the rhetorical devices. Anaphora, amplification, climax, analogy, onomatopoeia,and alliteration. These are the examples from Cindy Rogers' article, in somewhat random order. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to simply identify which of the six rhetorical devices each one represents or uses. Fair warning, one of the examples uses analogy, onomatopoeia, alliteration, and similes. So don't complain if you manage to find more than one rhetorical device in an example. Consider it a bonus! And with no further ado, here are the examples:

1. When this happened, they fought. Stinging flames of words blistered their tongues. Silence was worse. Beneath its slow-burning weight their black looks singed. After a few days, their minds shriveled into dead coals. Some speechless nights they lay together like lawbooks turned completely to ash.
2. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assignment, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner. 
3. We ran out of the house to the telephone box.
   "Let's call the police as well," Jim said.
   "And  the ambulance."
   "And Ernie Jenkins; he likes fire."
4. Nanapush cursed the moose, cursed himself, cursed the fishhooks, cursed the person who so carefully and sturdily constructed the boat that would not fall apart?
5. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
6. Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand to the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained and solitary as an oyster? he carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.
7. That's when I came to know that to be left, sent off, abandoned, was not of the moment, but a black ditch to the side of the road of your life, a sudden washout, a pothole that went down to China.
8. He wrote to the governor of North Dakota, to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. He wrote to the President of the United States and to county officials on every level. He wrote to Bernadette Morrissey and to the sick former land agent. He wrote to the state senators and representatives?
9. Davy smacked, swallowed, sank to yet more earnest sleep.
10. I lick the front page, which is all advertisements for films and dances in the city. I lick the headlines. I lick the great attacks of Patton and Montgomery in France and Germany. I lick the war in the Pacific. I lick the obituaries and the sad memorial poems, the sports pages, the market prices of eggs, butter and bacon. I suck the paper till there isn't a smidgen of grease.
11. but hearing Dad wrack and hawk and bits of his lung hitting whang in the pan.
12. A nine-year-old shouldn't be dragged from her house by someone who hates her.
    Nor be forced to hear the language of the unloved.
    Nor be jiggled in the laps of perverts.
    A 9-year-old shouldn't be told, "We'll take you home now , but we'll be back.
    We're right outside your window."
13. In this squeezed mass of children, I was a birch-bark scrap. I was floating downstream in a rolling current, twisting and spinning. Tipping. Dark water rushed up through the center of me and leaked out of my eyes.
    

There you go! Just match up the  rhetorical devices with the examples. What could be simpler, right? (Yes, I will provide answers in a while - but try it without them, first!)

Cindy Rogers also includes two examples that she doesn't identify. Feel free to decide yourself what you think these use:

1. Tall as a boxcar, nailed up of laths spaced on oak posts, it leaned back in time.
2. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls?

You may, of course, choose to rewrite any of these. Or use one as a cornerstone (initial spark? catalyst!) for something of your very own!

Write?