How to use rhetoric to build power-packed sentences By Tony Spencer-Smith

Learn five classic rhetorical techniques to strengthen your writing and communicate with greater clarity, style and persuasive power.

Wouldn't it be great if you could express your thoughts with greatly enhanced persuasive power; if you could string words together in such a way your sentences became irresistible to your audience?

Well guess what: great thinkers have for millennia, at least as far back as the ancient Greeks, been doing their best to work out how to do just that – and their findings are available to you.

I'm talking about rhetoric, the study of how to use language to persuade others.

Because it has been around so long, rhetoric is sometimes thought to be an outdated art. But much of it is still immensely effective. Here's how Mark Forsyth puts it in his book The Elements of Eloquence: "The figures of rhetoric … are the techniques for making a single phrase striking and memorable just by altering the wording. Not by saying something different, but by saying something in a different way. They are the formulas for producing great lines."

Let's have a look at five of those figures of rhetoric.

The mysterious power of three

"I stand here today humbled by the task before us, grateful for the trust you have bestowed, mindful of the sacrifices borne by our ancestors."

President Obama, a consummate wordsmith, used this device over and over to give his words a statesmanlike quality. Its formal name is the tricolon.

Starting a sentence with a pronoun

Normally a pronoun follows the noun to which it refers: "He loved roses and always kept a vase of them on display." Here the pronoun them comes after the noun roses.

But what about here: "They are not long, the days of wine and roses." In this line from Ernest Dowson's poem Vitae Summa Brevis, the pronoun comes before the roses, adding a deep poignancy. The formal name for this subtle twist is prolepsis, which unfortunately sounds like a physical ailment.

Tricky transferring of adjectives

"His eyes widened and an astonished piece of toast fell from his grasp." P.G. Wodehouse, famous for his comic novels, used a variety of forms of humour. One of them is known as the transferred epithet, where an adjective is deliberately attached to the wrong noun, as in the piece of toast here.

This device can be used for all sorts of reasons, not just humour. Think of an unhappy marriage or a lonely street.

Ending a sentence with the punchline

The periodic sentence makes its main point at the very end, by saving the main verb until then.

Sting's sinister song does just that:

"Every breath you take, and every move you make, every bond you break, every step you take, I'll be watching you."

Answering your own question

One of the most powerful structural principles in writing is to continually answer the questions you have raised in your readers' minds with each statement you make.

One of the most direct ways to do this is to ask a question and immediately answer it. This device has the name hypophora.

"Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To 'Why am I here?' To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus." (Enid Bagnold, Autobiography, 1969)

These are just a few of the multitude of rhetorical devices. And there are numerous other ways to supercharge your words. If you want to explore these techniques and turn your writing from okay to mesmeric, you can do it at CCE's new course, The Secrets of Eloquence.

Tony Spencer-Smith is an award-winning novelist, a former Editor-in-Chief of Reader's Digest Magazine and an experienced corporate writer and writing trainer. His book The Essentials of Great Writing was published in Sydney in 2009. His course The Secrets of Eloquence is the culmination of all he has learnt about the writing craft, both as a writer and a trainer.