How about that rhetoric?

This rhetoric. Pretty dang cool site. How many rhetorical figures have you got memorized?

"If you yell at me, you'll stub your toe!''

How's that for cataplexis?

I worked on this. And this.

Click to expand...

I'm already tempted to buy the first one. When you're writing, do you employ some rhetorical device, and say to yourself, I'd better use a this, then I'll follow up with a that?

I'm just a little bit surprised that there are so few comments. Then again, I'm new around here so I don't know what to expect. To me, the rediscovery of rhetoric is a humbling experience, and it helps debunk the myth that writing can't be taught (you're either talented or you're not). If I write a sentence of which I am very proud, which is so great it hovers off the page and does hanging-on-a-rope acrobatics for me, it knocks me down a notch to think that I really did not invent whatever cleverness I used. As it turns out, the cleverness is widely known as a snapowitz, and in ancient Greece eight year old children used the same snapowitz to insult each other on the playground.

The art of communication has been practiced and refined over hundreds of years, and here it all is (a chunk anyway) on the net for us to grab and study. Its ok if nobody likes this dumb thread, but I'm kind of curious to know why. Is rhetoric boring? Do you already have a firm grasp of it? Does it not apply to the type of writing you do?

Thank you