Hello Poets and friends, today I am back from my last vacation from working as an employee. I am now in transition to a new life which might leave more time for writing, but I also hope to set up a small business as an independent contractor, hike more, brew bake, and finally do some overdue house maintenance.

As part of potentially being a consultant, I have started to look at rhetorical devices in language and not surprisingly, I find that a lot of the tools are the same as for poetic devices, which is very useful.

Rhetoric is the art of convincing and we find examples of this art all around us, and of course, language is just a part of this. It also includes body language, voice, clothes, and a lot more.

I think exploring rhetorical devices would be a good thing, not just to express our own causes but also to improve our own abilities to look beyond the “rhetorical tricks” of politicians and salespersons to see the hollowness below a speech.

Many of the devices we have used before like repetitions, metaphor, alliteration, internal rhymes, etc. Others we may have used less such as hyperbole and allusions. In my view the main difference, though between a poetic device and a rhetorical device is how we use it. There has to be a cause that we want to use for convincing.

Many of us remember how Glenn Buttkus used to take a prompt on poetic devices and use it for rhetoric purposes, and many spoken word artists use the same.

I know that many of us are not comfortable in expressing our political opinions so the cause can be anything. Maybe you can imagine yourself trying to sell a used car or convince a teenager to clean up their room.

Imagine yourself giving this as a speech and reading it aloud for yourself. Maybe you may want to use the next live session to perform your speech. You can also try to find an old poem and use rhetorical devices to improve the impact of your message.

You can also listen to speeches that are famous for their rhetorical qualities and try to find how the speaker/writer is doing it.

For instance, here you can find a transcript of Marting Luther King’s “I have a Dream”- speech.

I have collected a few useful links for rhetorical devices, that you may want to refer to for further research of the matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_device

https://www.thesaurus.com/e/writing/rhetorical-devices/

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/rhetorical-devices-list-examples

When you have written your poem (any form is allowed including prose poetry) post it to your blog and link your poem below. Then do go around and comment on others. Since this will be a prompt where people may argue for causes that you disagree with please try to focus on how the rhetorical devices has been used rather than what is argued (note to self as well).

And, please remember to have fun.