Module 2: Section A
Self Check: The Right Tool for the Job
Your transcendentalist friends really know how to wear their rhetorical tool belts!
Now, you try. Complete the self-check activity by looking at the prompt below and thinking about the ansswer. Click the text box to check for the correct answer.
Identify the rhetorical device used in each passage:
"But not only is man vain and fond of power, but the same want of development, which thus affects him morally in the intellect, prevents his discerning the destiny of woman. The boy wants no woman, but only a girl to play ball with him, and mark his pocket handkerchief." (Fuller, The Great Lawsuit)
Understatement. Fuller says that men only want a girl to play ball with, which makes the seriousness and complexity of the situation seem trivial.
"All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it." (Thoreau, Civil Disobedience)
Analogy. An analogy is a comparison. In this example, voting is compared to betting in card games.
"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide;" (Emerson, Self-Reliance)
Hyperbole. Hyperbole is an exaggeration. In this example, "Ignorance is suicide" is an exaggeration.
"He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins." (Emerson, Self Reliance)
Paradox. Paradox is something that contradicts itself but is somehow true on some level. In this example, the idea of growing old in youth is contradictory yet true on another level.
"Meanwhile, not a few believe, and men themselves have expressed the opinion, that the time is come when Euridice is to call for an Orpheus, rather than Orpheus for Euridice; that the idea of man, however imperfectly brought out, has been far more so than that of woman, and that an improvement in the daughters will best aid the reformation of the sons of this age." (Fuller, The Great Lawsuit)
Allusion. Allusion is a reference to a famous person, event, or work of art. In this example, Fuller refers to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Euridice.
"Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string." (Emerson, Self-Reliance)
Metaphor. Metaphor compares two things. In this example, Emerson compares the feeling of trusting one's self to the resonance (the ongoing, stable tone) of a violin, cello, or bass string.
"A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." (Emerson, Self-Reliance)
Irony. Irony involves the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning. In this example, it is unexpected that the thoughts we each reject come back to us through others, and then we think they are brilliant.
