Why You Should Care About Rhetorical Devices

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing Podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. Episode 18. Today we're going to be learning about rhetorical devices and how they can make our creative writing more engaging, more powerful, and more interesting. And welcome back to the podcast. My name is Brad Reed, and I am so glad that you're here with us today.

I want to wish you a happy Memorial Day and give you a hello from the beautiful Oregon coast here as spring begins to spring. So thank you so much for being a listener of the show. A very special thanks to the members of the Patreon team who do so much to help make this show possible. Before we get into today's topic, I want to encourage you to check out the website for the show. You can find that at bradreadwrites. com.

Understanding Rhetorical Devices

Learn about all the benefits of being part of the Patreon team and follow me on Twitter at bradreadwrites. Love to follow my fellow writers back, so I'd love to touch base with you there. All right, so on to today's topic. What are rhetorical devices and how can they make our creative writing more powerful? As I sit here recording this week's podcast, I have on my desk next to me a textbook that I use for teaching a college writing class.

Now, this textbook is called Everything is an Argument. And it explores the many ways that we are being persuaded all the time by virtually everything around us. I mean, sure, there are commercials trying to get us to buy things. We're all aware of that kind of persuasion.

But there's also a family or friends offering us advice about life choices we might be considering. Maybe even pastors or other religious leaders trying to convince us to stay on the straight and narrow path. But these are just some of the more obvious ways that we are constantly surrounded by what we're going to call arguments on today's show.

So before we get too far in, we need to define a couple of terms. And the first one is this term argument. Now, often when I use the term argument with my students, they think of being in a fight, right? Emotions are running high. Maybe feelings are getting hurt. And there's some sort of verbal altercation happening, maybe even a physical one, when they think of this term argument.

Now, for today's topic, I want to widen our definition of what we mean by this word argument. So for our purposes today, argument simply means anything that's trying to persuade someone else to think or act in a certain way. So there's really not this emotional connection that we think of when it comes to argument.

So I want to look at a few examples of what I would consider an argument so that it's clear what we're talking about today. So what I want you to do is look at the clothes that you're wearing right now and ask yourself, why did I choose to wear these clothes today? So if you happen to be on your way to a job interview, you likely chose those clothes in order to impress your potential employer, right? You want them to think that you are capable, that you are professional.

But maybe you're headed out with friends, right? You're probably dressing in to fit in with that group of people that you're going to go spend time with. And it might depend on the specific bar or the restaurant that you're headed to, right?

So you're very intentionally choosing those clothes. So in other words, your clothes are a form of argument. You're using them to try to persuade someone, however subtly, about how they should think of you, right?

So in fact, what I'm doing right now is actually an argument. Now, obviously, I'm not mad at you and I hope you're not mad at me. So there aren't any overriding emotions we're dealing with at all, right? It's not a fight, but it is an argument. In fact, everything about this show so far has been an argument, me trying to convince you to believe or think in a certain way.

So the music that played at the beginning of the show, that's part of the argument. The voiceover, that voice that announces the show, that's part of the argument. All of it is trying to persuade you that I'm someone you should listen to, right? Somebody that hopefully you can learn something from. Even the specific words I've chosen to speak to you are an argument.

So for example, in real life, sometimes I swear, right? Now I'm actively choosing not to do that right now because I want you to think of me in a certain way that, you know, wouldn't be as convincing if I was sitting here swearing up a storm while I was talking to you, right? Even in the title of this episode, right? It has that word rhetoric in it. A word that I know not all of the listeners will be familiar with, but hopefully using that term lends some credibility to me as a teacher and as a writer.

So in other words, everything I'm doing with this show is an argument, trying to persuade you to believe something, right? To feel a certain way. So that's what we mean by argument in today's show. And in that sense, I think the title of this textbook is correct. Everything really is an argument because everything is chosen to make others feel or think in a certain way, even if that reason is very, very subtle and often we're not even aware that we're doing it, right?

So here's why this is vital for us to understand as writers. Like it or not, every story we write, whether long or short fiction, nonfiction, planned or pantsed, is also an argument. Now, sometimes we're very much trying to persuade our readers to see the world in a very specific way, right? Sometimes we have themes, messages that we want to get across in our writing.

But even when we don't, at the very least, we're trying to persuade our audience to keep turning the page, to enjoy the reading experience. So even that is an argument, right? We're trying to convince our readers they should keep reading and we're trying to convince our readers that they're having an enjoyable experience with the stories that we're telling them. And if you think about it, the same is actually true for the characters in our books. Everything is an argument for them as well. They aren't just saying words and taking actions because the plot demands it.

They aren't just wearing that little red dress or that slick new tux because it makes for a nice detail in your book. They're actually making very specific choices about everything they do based on the argument that they are trying to make to the people and situations around them. Now, this concept of everything being an argument is too big to tackle in a single podcast episode.

The Power of Repetition

So we're going to leave some of it for another day. But I want to do something very specific with this concept today. And it has to do with something called rhetorical devices.

So here we have yet another term that we need to define before we get fully into our topic today, this term rhetoric. Now, this is a term you might not have heard since college or maybe high school. So it's worth reviewing what we mean by this term rhetoric.

So rhetoric is simply language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience. And listen to the key words in that definition, persuasive and impressive. So if we want to simplify that even more, we can think of rhetoric as simply a set of tools that we can use to get others to think differently about something, about anything, really.

So when I'm talking about rhetorical devices, I'm really just talking about specific techniques of convincing. So when you hear me use this term rhetorical devices, you can simply think of ways of convincing. So let's jump into some of these rhetorical devices and see how we can use them to bring our writing to life and make it more compelling.

The first one I want to look at is one that most people are already familiar with, and it's the rhetorical device of repetition. Now, in traditional persuasive speaking or writing, repeating a word or a phrase is a way to implant that idea or that concept in the audience's mind so that they can remember it. So think of a speech like Dr. Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. The reason we call it the I Have a Dream speech is because of how often he repeats that phrase during the speech. It sticks in our mind because of that.

And even long after hearing it continues to make an impact. In fact, if you, it's become almost synonymous, right? Dr. Martin Luther King and the I Have a Dream speech.

So nearly every powerful speech that I've studied uses this technique and they use this technique a lot, but it's not just in speeches. Let's look at some examples from literature. What I'm going to read to you is a very short excerpt from Nicholson Baker's The Everlasting Story of Nory. And it goes like this. Nory was a Catholic because her mother was a Catholic. And Nory's mother was a Catholic because her father was a Catholic.

And her father was a Catholic because his mother was a Catholic or had been. Now, Baker could easily have said something like, Nory was a Catholic because that had been her family's religion for generations. But if he had just left it at that, it wouldn't have wouldn't have meant as much, right? It might be a sentence that we'd simply read and forget. Just another detail kind of hidden in a larger story.

But by repeating the word Catholic so many times, six times in a single sentence, in fact, it elevates the importance of this fact, right? This idea of being Catholic, it elevates that so that we recognize it. We can't miss how big Catholicism is in this character's life. The repetition has magnified it to a point that it's now buried in our memories for the writer to call upon later in the story.

So later on when we hear this mention of Catholicism, we have this new understanding of the context, right? This registers that this is book and underline every occurrence of that word night, you would find the story absolutely littered with it and often used in different ways. Sometimes he's talking about a literal night, right? Night has fallen. And oftentimes he's talking about a figurative night, like a night of the soul or a dark night of hopelessness or kind of a night of his faith failing him.

So this subtle repetition grounds us in the book and carries us along almost like a foundation of the story, right? Something to hold on to, something to support it all, is this idea of night that gets constantly repeated. And each new mention deepens our understanding of the symbol. We look at it in different ways from different perspectives. And in so doing, it persuades us more and more to see the world how Wiesel wants us to see it.

In other words, it's an argumentative technique that proves very effective in this novel, this use of the rhetorical device of repetition. But there's one last aspect of repetition I'd like to touch on before we move on to one more rhetorical device today. And this is actually my favorite way to use repetition. And it's one that not everybody is familiar with, so I think you might find this one interesting and useful.

So in fiction especially, repetition can be a subtle subtextual signal to our reader not to trust or believe a certain character. You see, we're naturally kind of suspicious of a person who repeats something too often, right? Especially if it's a piece of advice or a belief, right? We start to get the sense that they're actually trying to convince themselves of something rather than the people that they're talking to. Again, a few examples is probably the best way to illustrate this kind of fun use of repetition.

So if you haven't read Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway, you really should read this story. It's quite short and a great study in writing dialogue and subtext. I'll throw a link to this story up in the show notes at the website.

Anyway, the story is about a young couple arguing about whether or not the woman should get an abortion. Now that's never actually stated in the story. The word's abortion is never used, but it's implied in the subtext. And it becomes clear that the man really wants her to go through with it, but the woman is nervous, right? She's concerned about the ramifications on their relationship and what life looks like afterwards and all of that stuff. And part of what Hemingway does so well in this short little story is he uses repetition as a way to undercut a character's trustworthiness.

So as the man in the story is trying to convince the woman that it's a really simple, ordinary operation, he keeps telling her that she doesn't have to do it if she really doesn't want to. He says this over and over again. You know, he says that you don't have to do it if you don't want to. And she basically tells him through subtext that she doesn't want to, but then he says it again just a few sentences later.

So the first time we hear this, we kind of think he's being honest, right? We take him as just kind of a nice guy that wants her to know that he's okay with whatever decision she makes. But by the second or even third repetition of this, we start thinking, wait a second, this guy doesn't actually mean that at all, right? He's using it to pressure her into doing what he actually wants her to do.

So the more he says it, the more clearly we start to understand that he actually means the exact opposite, that she doesn't really have a choice, that he just wants to be able to blame things on her if she does go through with it and then things don't work out like he expects that they will, right? Really powerful technique that readers enjoy when they get it. They get to solve this little mystery, this little puzzle. And I'm toying with this technique right now in my current work in progress. The story I'm writing is about a woman who has to survive a harrowing trek through the wilds of Oregon to get home after a massive earthquake destroys the infrastructure of the Pacific Northwest. She begins the story with a really strong faith in God, but as things get harder and harder and things don't go as she planned, that faith begins to come apart.

Now, rather than have her just say this out loud, something like, oh, I'm not sure I can trust God like I thought I could before, she instead starts to repeatedly talk about how strong her faith is, how unshakable it is. And my hope is that the more she repeats this line, the more my readers begin to put it together that she's actually trying to convince herself that she's in a state of denial about her own beliefs and too scared to confront them directly, so she keeps telling herself this over and over again to try to convince her. It's a really fun technique to play with, and it helps your audience connect more with your story, because rather than just be straight up told what's happening, they get to discover it for themselves, right? They get to solve this little mystery of the story that gives them confidence in you as a writer, confidence in them as a reader, and engages them, invests them more in your story.

Exploring Polysyndeton

So the second technique I want to explore with you today has a big, impossible to remember name, but the good news is that the name actually doesn't matter. So it doesn't matter at all if you forget the name of this technique as soon as I tell it to you. It's really the concept that I think you're going to want to try and going to want to play with in your writing.

So the technique, the rhetorical device is called polysyndeton. So it's P-O-L-Y-S-Y-N-D-E-T-O-N, polysyndeton. And again, you can forget that immediately if you'd like. I often do and have to go back and look it up again, even though I teach this every year to my students in our rhetorical devices section.

So this one seems deceptively simple, this rhetorical device, but it works really effectively when it's used in the right places. So polysyndeton is basically giving a list of things using conjunctions, things like and, sometimes, or rather than commas. And the example I like to use to illustrate this rhetorical device actually comes from the Bible. I can't remember what chapter, verse, book it's in, but it's something I copied and pasted and added to my little resource file to go back to.

So I'm going to read this to you twice, and I just want you to kind of feel the difference between these two sentences each time I read them. So the first time, I'm going to read this to you with commas to separate the list, just like we would normally do in writing. The second time, I'm going to read it to you as it actually appears in print as a polysyndeton.

So here it is the way it actually is not printed using commas. And Joshua and all of Israel with him took Achan the son of Zerah, the silver, the garment, the wedge of gold, his sons, his daughters, his oxen, his asses, his sheep, his tent, and all that he had. Okay, so there it is without the polysyndeton, right? Just commas separating those, so it sounds like a list.

Now I'm going to read it as a polysyndeton with ands put in instead of just commas. And Joshua and all of Israel with him took Achan the son of Zerah and the silver and the garment and the wedge of gold and his sons and his daughters and his oxen and his asses and his sheep and his tent and all that he had. Now, can you feel the difference that second time?

The first time through without all the ands just sounds like a list, right? Almost like a grocery list. Here's the things he took. One, two, three, four, five, six.

Now you know. But the second time through when connected with all those ands instead of commas, each item added to the list felt bigger, right? You get the sense that Joshua took absolutely everything he could possibly take. There's something about using ands in this way that works almost like exaggeration. Each item listed this way builds upon the one before in a way that makes them all feel bigger somehow. It's a really subtle distinction on the page.

It's one that most readers don't even notice that you've done, but it has a surprisingly big impact in the mind of the reader. Let me give you another example. A few weeks ago in the podcast, we explored the writing of Cormac McCarthy. He likes to play with polysyndeton quite a bit, actually.

So listen to this sentence from the road where a father and a son are trying to survive in a desolate post-apocalyptic world. It goes like this. They hiked back out to the road and down to where they left the cart, and they made camp by the river pool at the falls and wash the earth and ash from the morals and put them to soak in a pan of water.

Now, this one's much more subtle, right? Probably because the items in this list are longer. They're not single word items. This is really a list of literally just five things that they did, right?

So all of these things could have been described as just a simple list without the and, or they even could have been broken out into five separate short sentences. But by tying these together as a polysyndeton, McCarthy's accomplishing a couple of things. So first of all, he's moving the action along at a pretty fast pace, something that he likely struggled with in a story where long sections of time are just kind of two people walking through the wilds trying to survive.

So by doing this polysyndeton, he encompasses quite a bit of time in a single sentence, but he's also using polysyndeton to show how difficult it is to survive in this world. He could have earth and ash from the morals and put them to soak in a pan of water, right? By stacking all of these things together, using ands, it gets bigger and bigger and seems more and more difficult. This, too, is something that I'm playing with in my own work in progress. One of the things I'm trying to accomplish is to make this journey for my protagonist sound as hard and as near impossible as I can. And polysyndeton offers a subtle way to do this.

So an example, I could simply list all of the challenges that lay ahead of her on this trip, right? I could say there's downed trees, landslides, river crossings, bears, injury, cold, and suspicious strangers. Or I could say it this way. I could tell you that she'll have to overcome downed trees and landslides and river crossings and bears and injury and cold and suspicious strangers, right?

Now, the journey seems huge, right? Imposing. And the dangers are larger than life. That's thanks to polysyndeton.

Now, the really cool thing about polysyndeton is it can work on a small list just as well as a big list. And I want to actually give you an example from a very famous speech. So I want to look at just one sentence, actually one part of a sentence from Barack Obama's 2008 election night victory speech.

Now the speech has become widely considered to be one of the great rhetorical speeches and it's because he uses so many of these rhetorical devices so effectively. In one section, he's talking about all the small donations that his supporters gave him during the campaign. And he says this. My campaign was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give $5 and $10 and $20 to the cause.

Now, did you catch the polysyndeton in there? Instead of saying they gave $5, $10 and $20, he says they gave $5 and $10 and $20. Now that's really just the addition of one and instead of a comma, but it feels so much bigger now. It feels like even more people gave money at even more dollar amounts. It has this kind of hyperbole or exaggeration feel to it, which is kind of fun.

Applying Rhetorical Techniques

So we're going to stop there with our first two rhetorical devices. We'll almost certainly explore more of them in future episodes. I think the overall concept of looking at everything in your story as an argument is really powerful though. Not only does it open up the door to using these time-honored, proven rhetorical devices to make our writing stronger and more compelling, but it helps us build tension into every page. And tension is what keeps readers turning the pages. If every character in your story is always angling for something, whether obvious or kind of bubbling just under the surface, then we get movement.

We get interest at every point in our stories. Our wise word today is a short one, but it really shines the spotlight on the importance of what we've been talking about today. Peter Shaffer, he's the award-winning playwright and screenwriter best known for his play and film adaptation of Amadeus, has this to say about rhetoric. The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal piece, or it's the verbal music of the piece.

Weekly Writing Challenge

Now, I love that. As you know from past episodes, I often think of writing and music as being kind of parallel art forms. And I love that Shaffer describes rhetoric as verbal music. Rhetorical devices are another instrument in the orchestra of tools that we have at our disposal as writers. If you have a favorite quote about writing, I would love to share it with the show's listeners here on the podcast. You can go to www.

bradreadwrites. com and click on the Talk to Us link to find out how you can share that with us. You could even leave us a voice message and hear your voice on a future podcast. Our weekly challenge this week is to use one of the tools you've been given this week in your writing.

So either repetition or polysyllabic. Maybe you want to try both. So find a place in your current work in progress where you can kind of play with one or both of these tools.

So what piece of dialogue might a character repeat throughout your story, either to heighten it in the reader's mind or maybe as a way to show that the character is trying to convince herself of something that may not be true? Or where do you find yourself listing things, even if it's only a few things, that could benefit from becoming larger in your reader's mind? Where might you be tempted to use hyperbole or exaggeration, but polysyllabic might be a more subtle way of enlarging its impact? I really hope you have some fun with these techniques. Have you ever bought a new tool for a hobby of yours?

So maybe like a router for your woodshop or a new pair of running shoes for your exercise regimen or a new effects pedal for your guitar, something like that. Do you remember the excitement of first putting that tool to use? That's what using these tools should feel like. It should feel fun to sit down and look at your writing and bring these new tools to bear and see what you can uncover with it.

So now you've got a couple of new gadgets, right, to use in your writing workshop. So that's going to do it for us this week. It's been a while since we've had guests on the show, but that is changing soon. I've got some great interviews lined up that I'm really excited to bring you. I'm not quite ready to announce names or details on that yet, but watch for those in the coming weeks. And if you know someone who would be great to hear from on the show, I'd like you to go to the website.

Again, that's BradReadWrites. com and click on the Suggest a Guest link to let us know about him. So until next time, I hope you'll drop in at BradReadWrites. com and start a conversation with your fellow writers about today's topic and consider joining the Patreon team. In this week's Real-Time Revision exclusive video for Patreon team members, I'm doing this week's weekly challenge where I'll be looking for places to use our rhetorical devices of repetition and polysyndeton in my own writing. This should make for a great companion piece to the podcast because you'll get to see how I go about using these techniques in real life, in my real writing, in real time.

So you can find out more about how to join that team by going to Patreon. com slash BradReadWrites. So until next week, remember the best way to improve your craft is by writing. That's what I'm off to go do and I hope you're off to do the same.

Let's get some words on the paper this week and we'll meet up again next week for another episode of the Inside Creative Writing podcast. If you liked today's show, please, please take a minute and give us a review on iTunes and share the show with some of your writer friends. Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing podcast with your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. We'll be back next week.