•
Accumulatio – the emphasis or summary of previously made points or inferences by excessive praise or accusation. •
Actio – canon #5 in Cicero's list of rhetorical canons; traditionally linked to oral rhetoric, referring to how a speech is given (including tone of voice and nonverbal gestures, among others). •
Ad hominem – rebutting an argument by attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making it rather than the substance of the argument itself. •
Adianoeta – a phrase carrying two meanings: an obvious meaning and a second, more subtle and ingenious one (more commonly known as double entendre). •
Alliteration – the use of a series of two or more words beginning with the same letter. •
Amphiboly – a sentence that may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous structure. •
Amplification – the act and the means of extending thoughts or statements to increase rhetorical effect, to add importance, or to make the most of a thought or circumstance. •
Anacoenosis – a speaker asks his or her audience or opponents for their opinion or answer to the point in question. •
Anadiplosis – repeating the last word of one clause or phrase to begin the next. •
Analogy – the use of a similar or parallel case or example to reason or argue a point. •
Anaphora – a succession of sentences beginning with the same word or group of words. •
Anastrophe – inversion of the natural word order. •
Anecdote – a brief narrative describing an interesting or amusing event. •
Antanaclasis – a figure of speech involving a
pun, consisting of the repeated use of the same word, each time with different meanings. •
Anticlimax – a bathetic collapse from an elevated subject to a mundane or vulgar one. •
Antimetabole – repetition of two words or short phrases, but in reversed order to establish a contrast. It is a specialized form of
chiasmus. •
Antinomy – two ideas about the same topic that can be worked out to a logical conclusion, but the conclusions contradict each other. •
Antiptosis – type of
enallage in which one
grammatical case is substituted for another. •
Antistrophe – repeating the last word in successive phrases, for example, "Since the time when from our state concord disappeared, liberty disappeared, good faith disappeared, friendship disappeared, the common weal disappeared." Also see:
epiphora. •
Antithesis – the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced or parallel words, phrases, or grammatical structures; the second stage of the dialectic process. •
Antonomasia – the substitution of an epithet for a proper name. •
Apophasis – pretending to deny something as a means of implicitly affirming it; as
paralipsis, mentioning something by saying that you will not mention it; the opposite of
occupatio. •
Aporia – a declaration of doubt, made for rhetorical purpose and often feigned. •
Aposiopesis – an abrupt stop in the middle of a sentence; used by a speaker to convey unwillingness or inability to complete a thought or statement. •
Apostrophe – a figure of speech consisting of a sudden turn in a text towards an exclamatory address to an imaginary person or a thing. •
Arete – virtue, excellence of character, qualities that would be inherent in a "natural leader", a component of
ethos. •
Argument – discourse characterized by reasons advanced to support conclusions. •
Argumentum ad baculum – settling a question by appealing to force. •
Ars dictaminis – the art of writing letters, introduced and taught during the Medieval rhetorical era. •
Assonance – words that repeat the same vowel sound. •
Asyndeton – the deliberate omission of
conjunctions that would normally be used. •
Audience – real, imagined, invoked, or ignored, this concept is at the very center of the intersections of composing and rhetoric. •
Aureation – the use of Latinate and
polysyllabic terms to "heighten"
diction. •
Auxesis – to place words or phrases in a certain order for climactic effect. •
Axioms – the point where scientific reasoning starts; principles that are not questioned. ==B==