A guide full of tips and tricks that hopefully doesn't recount the same old stuff in every other writing book under the sun, Wattpad and published alike. Covering everything from helpful resources like Susanna's Pacemaker to treating setting like ch...
As you get older, you start to realize that teachers don't give you the full story. First grade teachers might give you your first taste of addition and you think 'man, this isn't so hard' and then later you find out that you can also add positives and negatives and no one warned you about this nonsense. In high school Biology class, they teach you about punnett squares and how brown eyes are a dominant trait and if both your parents have blue eyes, sorry sucker, you were adopted. Then University bursts your bubble and tells you genetics is a whole lot more complicated than the watered down basics they deem simple enough for poor saps doing six hours of homework a night to satisfy their overbearing parents.
All this, I'm realizing, is also true of grammar. Sure, I know that in North America, we stick "quotation marks" around dialogue and put little dots at the end of complete clauses. (I confess, I also put periods at the end of incomplete clauses. For effect!) For the most part, I thought I had a fairly good grasp of grammar and general linguistics.
I was wrong. So gloriously wrong.
I recently picked up a book called 'Elements of Eloquence' by Mark Forsyth. I discovered this book title on Pinterest (ten points to Pinterest!) in a screencap of a Tumblr thing. Someone lamented their inability to translate cinematic musical scores swelling and lens flares flashing into something in writing. Another very clever person pointed out a few things in the family of figures of rhetoric that could possibly serve as replacements.
Figures of Rhetoric
In Forsyth's description, he notes that figures of rhetoric were a thing of Shakespeare's time, a thing the masterful playwright learned about in school. The reason why we don't learn it in school? Well, apparently many, many moons ago, the educated public decided they couldn't teach it anymore just in case learners of rhetoric become too good at speaking and too good at persuasion and would therefore get whatever they wanted.
That's how much power figures of rhetoric had. They were taken out of circulation lest people use it for evil, manipulative ends. Like this is the Elder wand or the Tesseract and no side can have it in case it falls into the wrong hands.
And I am about to hand this unspeakable power over to you.
Polyptoton
A polip-TOE-ton is a thing most of us have probably seen, not knowing there was a name for it. Knowing the name for it is pretty useful, really. Naming things helps us identify them a lot more easily. Before certain languages had a name for blue, cultures didn't even really perceive the colour! Once it had a name, it was actually easier for them to differentiate the shades between black and green. Scientific fact: knowing the names of things is powerful.
So, the polyptoton has quickly become my favorite figure of rhetoric. It's not always extraordinary, but when a polyptoton is good, it's really good.
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This is probably the most polyptotonic polyptoton that ever did polyptoton.
The basis of a polyptoton is a sentence that uses the same word in different forms or also works with homophones and homonyms. I won't bore you too much with the logistics of nouns and verbs and interjections.
"Please, please me" from the Beatles is an example, one that John Lennon admitted he stole from a Bing Crosby song his mother used to play. That just goes to show the way a good polyptoton can stick in your head.
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Not all polyptotons are so dramatic. Robert Frost wrote this one. It doesn't stick out to me the way "Please, please me" does. Still, it's oft quoted and memorable.
I was actually circling the clubs and found myself in a 'share your first line' game when I discovered @deprivor threw in a knock-out polyptoton entry in the form of "hurt people hurt people" meaning that people who have been hurt, hurt other people. I had a moment because that is the kind of mind-blowing rhetoric I find myself now living for. There's something so clever and poignant about it.
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They take a little more work, but an important moment can really be made memorable by a carefully crafted sentence. This is just one of many tricks that writers have proved tried and true to lock a scene into memory.
Maybe give it a shot! Comment if you have a good polyptoton!
