Oxymoron: A rhetorical figure in which incongruous or contradicting terms are combined

ex. "seriously funny", "to make haste slowly", "pretty ugly"

Paradox

Paradox: a statement that contradicts itself (wordnetweb.princeton.edu)

Example: "So foul and fair a day I have not seen." -Shakespeare, Macbeth

Dramatic Irony

Dramatic irony: (n) irony that is inherent in speeches or a situation of a drama and is understood by the audience but not grasped by the characters in the play.

Example: In the story Romeo and Juliet, the audience knew Romeo and Juliet were going to die before the characters knew.

VERBAL IRONY

Definition: A figure of speech in which what is said is the opposite of what is meant.
Example: A woman talking about how much she dislikes messy people and her house is a mess.

Deductive Reasoning

Definition: Deductive reasoning is when you use a generalization to get a specific point.
Example: All men are mortal, therefore if someone is a man, he is mortal.

Synecdoche: a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa






-General Motors announced cutbacks
-He was riding on a new set of Wheels

Metonymy

Definition: A figure of speech in which a word represents something else which it suggests.

Example: "The B.L.T. left without paying"

Whereas the B.L.T. has a deeper meaning. It refers to the customer who did not pay for the meal. Not the actual B.L.T.

Exclamation: a sharp or sudden utterance, or a spoken interjection.

Examples:

In a sentence: Lily's song was interrupted many times by rude exclamations from her enemy, Biff.

An exclamation itself: "Hey you! Come back!"

Anaphora

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Parenthesis

Parenthesis: an amplifying or explanatory word, phrase, or sentence, inserted in a passage from which is usually set off by punctuation; remark or passage that departs from theme of discourse; one or both of the curved marks (  ) used in writing and printing  to enclose a parenthetical expression or to group a symbolic unit in a logical or mathematical expression

Example: "For the vagabond-voyeur (and for travelers voyeurism is irresistible), nothing is not for notice, nothing is banal, nothing is ordinary: not a rock, not the shoulder of a passer-by, not a teapot."
- Cynthia Ozick, "The Shock of Teapots"

parallelism

Parallelism: To give a two or more parts of a sentence similar form so as to give the whole sentence a pattern.

Ex: He ate all his spinach, ate all his carrots and ate all his green beans.