Language in media usually is ornate, and Realistic Diction Is Unrealistic. These notes are covering the ways that text can be constructed artistically, without needing to have Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness.
These ways are also called "figures of speech"
, but we're not going to use that term because it could be confused as a synonym for "something to not take literally".
Methods to produce ornamentation in text involve features of words that aren't just their individual meaning, such as their relation to other words nearby, whether they repeat in a phrase, or the letters, or sounds, they start or end with, for example. Even Double Meaning is a way that phrasing is used rhetorically.
Technically, Constrained Writing is the same concept but generalized into whole works instead of just a single / few phrases, and without a rhetorical point to convey. A.k.a, whenever you deviate from "normal" speech, you're getting close to a manner of rhetorical phrasing, you just need an idea to convey to really make it.
Ideas that the writer might try to convey with these ways of phrasing can be categorized quite broadly, such as intensification of a subject, or drawing the audience's focus towards a subject.
While these notes are preoccupied with English / alphabetical writing systems, logographical systems such as Chinese can do similar things with similar features, like having multiple characters with the same radical, is similar to alliteration.
The repetition that makes the Repeat Index Index's tropes, are one way to be rhetorical, such as with:
In any case, some other patterns that we have noticed are:
- Any change from "standard" pronouciations:
- Non Sequitur
- Shout-Out: A.k.a Allusion
- Juxtaposed Linked Phrases: Contrasting consecutive phrases of text that also relate to each other, such as in these trope names that contrast a small something and a big something else, and juxtaposition in phrasing is a good way to summarize / trope-name juxtapositions in general:
- Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age
- Iconic Character, Forgotten Title
- Mature Work, Child Protagonists
- Period Piece, Modern Language
- Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense
- Small Girl, Big Gun
- Small Name, Big Ego
- Small Parent, Huge Child
- Small Role, Big Impact
- Small Start, Big Finish
- Ugly Hero, Good-Looking Villain
- Diacope: Repeating a phrase after a few unimportant words. Tropes that involve that are:
- For Your People, By Your People
- The Name Is Bond, James Bond
- One-Liner, Name... One-Liner and its subtrope:
- Double Don't Know for when the one-liner is "Don't Know".
- Shout Outs to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with "curiouser and curiouser".
- Epanalepsis: Where a phrase has the same word at its beginning and end, such as with:
- Shout Outs to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with "curiouser and curiouser".
- Antimetabole: Where not just the beginning and end of a phrase are the same, but the whole of a phrase is mirrored along some pivot.
- Added Alliterative Appeal and its subtropes.
- Department of Redundancy Department
- Dissimile
- Double Meaning
- Dramatic Pause
- Euphemisms and their variations, such as:
- Fun with Homophones
- Index of Lists
- Malaproper
- Metaphors:
- Person as Verb: A type of Anthimeria.
- Rhyme Tropes: All of them.
- Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness
- Shaped Like Itself
- Understatement
