6.

Antithesis is a figure of speech which refers to the

juxtaposition of opposing or contrasting ideas. It
involves the bringing out of a contrast in the ideas by an
obvious contrast in the words, clauses, or sentences,
within a parallel grammatical structure.
Examples:
These are examples of antithesis:

"Man proposes, God disposes." - Source unknown.

"Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing." Goethe.

"That's one small step for man, one giant leap for
mankind." - Neil Armstrong.

"To err is human; to forgive divine." - Alexander

Pope.

"Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice."

- William Shakespeare.

"Many are called, but few are chosen." Matthew

22:14.

7. Apostrophe is an exclamatory rhetorical figure of

speech, when a speaker or writer breaks off and directs
speech to an imaginary person or abstract quality or
idea.
1 | Page

Examples

Some examples of apostrophe are listed below:

1.
"O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of times."
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 1

2.
"Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so."
John Donne, Holy Sonnet X
3.
"Hello darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again."
Paul Simon, The Sounds of Silence
8. Assonance is a figure of speech that is found more
often in verse than in prose. It refers to the repetition of
vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases
or sentences.

Examples of Assonance
These are some examples:

"the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple

curtain" - The Raven By Edgar Allan Poe

"The crumbling thunder of seas" - Robert Louis

Stevenson

"That solitude which suits abstruser musings"

- The Princess VII.203 by Alfred Lord Tennyson

9. Hypophora is a figure of speech in which the

speaker raises a question and then answers it.
Hypophora is different from rhetorical questions. In a
rhetorical question the answer is not provided by the
writer. In hypophora, however, the writer poses the
question and answers it immediately after. Hypophora is
also called anthypophora or antipophora.

Examples

Here are some examples of hypophora:

"You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to

wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might
and with all the strength.." Winston Churchill, 4
June 1940.
"Thirty-one cakes, dampened with whiskey, bask
on window sills and shelves. Who are they for?
Friends. Not necessarily neighbor friends: indeed,

2 | Page

the larger share is intended for persons we've met

maybe once, perhaps not at all. People who've
struck our fancy. Like President Roosevelt. . . ."
Truman Capote, "A Christmas Memory."
Mademoiselle, December 1956)

"There are those who are asking the devotees of

civil rights, When will you be satisfied? We can
never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the
victim of the unspeakable horrors of police
brutality." Martin Luther King, Jr., 28 August
1963.

10. Alliteration is the repetition of initial sounds in

neighboring words.
Alliteration draws attention to the phrase and is often
used for emphasis.The initial consonant sound is usually
repeated in two neighboring words although sometimes
the repetition occurs also in words that are not
neighbors.
Examples:

sweet smell of success,

a dime a dozen,

bigger and better,

jump for joy

share a continent but not a country

11. Allusion

The act of alluding is to make indirect reference. It is a

literary device, a figure of speech that quickly
stimulates different ideas and associations using only a
couple of words.
Allusion relies on the reader being able to understand
the allusion and being familiar with the meaning hidden
behind the words.
Example:
Describing someone as a "Romeo" makes an allusion to
the famous young lover in Romeo and Juliet by William
Shakespeare

3. to wash ones hands of it. (allusion on Pontius

Pilatus, who sentenced Jesus to death, but washed
his hands afterwards to demonstrate that he was
not to blame for it.)
4. to be as old as Methusalem (allusion on Josephs
grandfather, who was 969 years old according to
the Old Testament)
12. An oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines
incongruous or contradictory terms. The plural
is oxymorons or oxymora.

Examples:

In an allusion the reference may be to a place, event,

literary work, myth, or work of art, either directly or by
implication.
Examples of allusion:

1. David was being such a scrooge!. (Scrooge" is

the allusion, and it refers to Charles Dicken's
novel, A Christmas Carol. Scrooge was very
greedy and unkind, which David was being
compared to.)
2. The software included a Trojan Horse. (allusion on
the Trojan horse from Greek mythology)

3 | Page

An oximoron can be made of an adjective and a noun:

Dark light

Deafening silence

Living dead

Open secret

Virtual reality

Oximorons can also be a combination of a noun and a

verb.