Assignment: Devices
Identifying Rhetorical Devices
AP Language
Directions: Carefully read each of the following statements and identify the rhetorical
device/figure of speech contained in each. Some may contain more than one device.
You may choose among these terms:
Alliteration
Allusion
Analogy
Antithesis
Apostrophe
Epithet
Hyperbole
Metaphor
Metonymy/Synecdoche
Onomatopoeia
Oxymoron
Parallelism
Parenthesis
Personification
Rhetorical Question
Simile
Understatement/Litotes
1. The village went to sleep, window by window. (Edmund Gilligan)
2. You are as cold and pitiless as your own marble. (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
3. But if possibility of evil be to exclude good, no good ever can be done. (Samuel
Johnson)
4. Frankly, my dear, I don't feel like dining out.
5. The true nature of man, his true good, true virtue, an true religion are things which
cannot be known separately. (Blaise Pascal)
6. Clang battleaxes, and crash brand! Let the King reign. (Alfred Lord Tennyson)
7. His first irresistible notion was that the whole China Sea had climbed on the bridge.
(Joseph Conrad)
8. Roll on, thou dark blue ocean, roll. (George Gordon, Lord Byron)
O He employs over 100 hands on hieman bin Ali