FIGURES OF SPEECH

• that has other meaning than its normal

definition.

• rely on implied or suggested meaning, rather

than a dictionary definition.
 SIMILE
• Comparison between two distinct or
fundamentally dissimilar things.
• It uses as or like to compare things.

I ride the “A” train

And feel like a ball-
Bearing in a roller skate.
Riding the “A” by May Stevenson
• METAPHOR
• Implied comparison between two unlike
things that actually have something
important in common.

• The road was a ribbon of moonlight.

• PERSONIFICATION
• Attributing of the qualities of the person
to things that is not human.
• Giving of personal attributes or
characteristics to inanimate objects.
Q is for the Quietness
Of Sunday avenues
When silence walks the city
In her pretty velvet shoes;
Q is for the Quietness by Phyllis McGinley
• APOSTROPHE
• Addressing personified objects as real
persons.
• Address some absent person or thing.

Death, be not proud, though some have

called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.
Death, Be Not Proud by John Donne
• HYPERBOLE
• Is an exaggeration for dramatic effect
and not intending to deceive.

• I could eat a horse.

• Is this the face that launched a
thousand ships and burnt the topless
towers of Ilium?
-Christopher Marlowe
• ANAPHORA
• Repetition of a word a phrase in the
beginning of the several successive
verbs, clauses or sentences.
• Love is real, real is love.
• For everything there is a season, and a
time for every matter under heaven;
A time to be born, and a time to die:
a time to plant and a time to pluck up what
is planted.
• OXYMORON
• Word or group of words that is self-
contradicting.

• Parting is such a sweet sorrow.

• Why then, O brawling love! O loving
hate!
• ONOMATOPEIA
• Naming of a thing or action by vocal
imitation of the sound associated with it.

• With a whoosh of rockets and the thud

of mortars the attack began.
• ANADIPLOSIS
• is the repetition of the last word of a
preceding clause.
• The word is used at the end of a sentence
and then used again at the beginning of
the next sentence.
• “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate.
Hate leads to suffering.” —Yoda, Star Wars