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Rhetorical Devices In The Rhetoric

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hetoric – ars bene dicendi – is, according to the antique definition, the art of speaking and writing well, adequate to the situation, proving morality and the desire to obtain an effect, an expression which can attract the general interest. According to W. Jens, it contains both the theory (ars rhetorica, the art of speaking), as well as the practice (ars oratoria, eloquence). Rhetoric created, as theory (rhetorica docens), a multitude of categories to produce (and analyse) some efficient texts. According to Jens’ definition, the rhetoric is a certain valoric quality (bene) which supersedes the grammatical quality of a simple correctness in speech (recte). This special valoric quality forms the artistic character (ars) of rhetoric. …show more content…

Persuasion was at the centre of definitions of rhetoric in the manuals that taught Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Rhetoric, according to Aristotle in his The Rhetoric, was the faculty of observing on any given case the available means of persuasion. Phaedrus who was highly influenced by Socrates, says in his dialogue that “the intending orator is under no necessity of understanding what is likely to be thought just by the body of men who are to give judgment; nor need he know what is truly good or noble, but what will be thought so, since it is on the latter, not the former, that persuasion depends.” Plato sets up in his dialogues what would become the key views of the anti-rhetorical prejudice: the philosopher is concerned with the true and the just, while the rhetorician struggles only to appear just. Persuasion is portrayed as duplicitous and separated from …show more content…

Michel de Montaigne saw the dangers inherent in language: to him, rhetoric was something designed to persuade the ignorant, to deceive and flatter. Early on, he admitted that the function of grammatical jargon was to give great importance to concepts that were really very simple. The popular mode of verbal expression in the sixteenth century, the popular rhetoric, depended upon amplification and illustration. In The Art of English Poesy, George Puttenham explains that the purpose of “exornation” (ornamentation) is “to delight and allure as well the mind as the ear.” In his book, The Art of Rhetoric, Thomas Wilson argued that it was best to keep one’s syntax simple, because if clause is piled on clause “the hearers will be forced to forget full of what was said first, before the sentence be half ended, or else be blinded with confounding of many things together.” Wilson’s advice is to avoid repetition of sounds (either by alliteration, especially of vowels, or rhyme) and

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