Date:         Fri, 5 Dec 1997 23:59:37 EST
From: Will a real person stand up? <mbarker@MIT.EDU>
Subject:      EXERCISE: On Your Tropes and Schemes!

[my elusive tropes and schemes...]

A list of tropes:

1.  metaphor
2.  simile
3.  personification
4.  irony
5.  hyperbole
6.  understatement
7.  metonymy
8.  synecdoche

A list of schemes:

1.  allegory,
2.  parallelism
3.  antithesis
4.  congeries
5.  apostrophe
6.  enthymeme
7.  interrogatio
8.  gradatio

Okay.  The first part of the exercise is to make sure you know what
each of these means!  You may consult your dictionaries, your
rhetorical grammars, or whatever sources you like (even knocking out
the old brain cells is permitted!).

The second part of the exercise is work.  Next time you are trying to
write about something, take one of these lists (the tropes or the
schemes) and walk down through all eight flavorings, trying them out.
Talking about love?  Think about a gooey metaphor, a fine simile, a
ribald personification, a phrase with irony, some hyperbole, perhaps
an understatement, a dash of metonymy, or even the odd synecdoche!

Or, if you're all troped out, try dressing it up in a scheme!  Think
of the fine allegories of love lurking in your swamp, or maybe the
parallelism of two bodies?  don't you hate that antithesis, though?
or you could do a congeries line!  (not to mention the apostrophe most
insincere) what about enthymememe (sorry, the opera singer got stuck)?
do you think you might employ interrogatio?  or if not, how about
gradatio?

[psst?  no idea what most of those flaky words mean?  try making it
multiple choice...here's most--but not all!--of the meanings...  match
them up, then figure out which ones I left out, and add those
meanings:

a.  overstatement or exaggeration

b.  substituting one word for another which it suggests or to which it
is in some way related

c.  combining opposites into one statement--"To be or not to be, that
is the question"

d.  a turning from one's immediate audience to address another, who
may be present only in the imagination

e.  a progressive advance from one statement to another until a climax
is achieved

f.  an accumulation of statements or phrases that say essentially the
same thing

g.  a discrepancy between a speaker's literal statement and his
attitude or intent

h.  a comparison announced by "like" or "as"

i.  constructing sentences or phrases that resemble one another
syntactically

j.  attributing human qualities to a nonhuman being or object

k.  a loosely syllogistic form of reasoning in which the speaker
assumes that any missing premises will be supplied by the audience

l.  substituting part for whole,

m.  the "rhetorical" question, which is posed for argumentative effect
and requires no answer