Unconsciously it is easy to use many of the ten tropes. I find that past writings are full of similes, hyperbole, metaphors and everything in between. For example, writing my first college essay I wrote about water rights in southern Colorado. In my essay, I explained how "water rights flow like water, even though it dries up before it reaches the majority of citizens in southern Colorado". This, and many other examples, are my rhetorical skills coming to life.
It is really cool to see how unconsciously I used some of the tropes that have been studied for centuries. Now that I consciously thinking about improving my writing and communication skills, I can perfect these tools. It's funny, back when I didn't know that I was even using ancient rhetorical asset, I was so mixed up! What I mean by that is, My wording was ugly! I had words mixed into sentences that made no sense and my whole idea was jammed into a run-on-sentence(remember learning about those in sixth grade?!). Now learning about the importance of consciously thinking about my writing has helped me develop ideas and make successful arguments. Awesome.
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I feel the same way. The tropes are easier to identify than they are to create. I think since we are already such good writers we should just write and then go back and identify the tropes lol.
ReplyDeleteMan, I hated learning and having to fix run-on sentences. But I agree, when we were younger I know I definitely used a lot of words that I really didn't know the meaning too; I kinda just threw them in there to make that sentence sound pretty. And man, a lot of run-on sentences back in the day. I remember when I was in high school and we had to have tropes in our papers I'd pretty much just write the paper and then go back to it later and re-read my paper and try to think of a trope I could just randomly add into a paragraph. That worked for me, lol.
ReplyDeleteI think it would be really cool to memorize all the tropes and figures at sometime so we could not only be able to throw some in our work after the fact, but be able to use them initially to strengthen pieces of writing.
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