Writing Help 129 | - Freelance Writer
Mar 29, 2013 | #1
Using Advanced Rhetorical Devices to Surprise and Delight
As was the case for the rhetorical device parenthesis, most people know something about ellipsis, but not through its use in rhetoric. As we recall from a previous article, the paired punctuation marks parentheses are widely known and used, while their related but distinct rhetorical partner parenthesis is virtually unheard of. All of us know ellipses, perhaps by another name like infinity dots, because the three little periods in a row (...) are very common in informal prose, and even have many proper uses in formal writing. These are used to suggest that something is missing, and also perhaps that a given thought continues beyond the words on the page. The rhetorical use of the term is related, but it has other aspects which are quite distinct, and ellipses (the punctuation marks) are not even necessary for its construction.
In rhetoric, ellipsis refers to omission of words which are technically required by a given sentence, but which can be omitted without losing the sense of the sentence. In the following example, there are two very subtle uses of ellipsis: "The jail still held the heart I lost and the finger I stole." Although this is an odd sentence, it reads smoothly and looks completely correct in a conventional way; so, where is the ellipsis? Read the first part of the sentence, and narrow in on the phrase "the heart I lost." Is there a word missing here? Compare that phrase to the following one with exactly the same meaning: "the heart that I lost." After seeing the modified version, the ellipsis of the first example becomes clear. That is missing in the first sentence in two different places, before both occurrences of I. We tend not to notice it is missing because this kind of shortcut is very common in English, but just because it is understood to be there does not mean it is actually present. As a result, we have a very common and very brief case of ellipsis.
In the example above, the effects of ellipsis are not completely obvious, but they are present nonetheless. Read the sentence through once the way it is presented in the quoted example, and once with the missing thats inserted in their proper places. Do you notice any difference? Comparatively, the example which uses ellipsis is more compact and powerful because it eliminates words which have no real bearing on the sense of the sentence. English is full of small blocky words which need to be inserted into sentences to make them work grammatically, but often at the price of decreased euphony (pleasant-soundingness). Ellipsis allows us to eliminate some of these very common recurring words to smooth out the sound of our prose, with the additional effect of cutting the number of words in total and thus placing more emphasis on the important words in a given sentence.
In a more obvious but no less comprehensible example of ellipsis, we can see the chopping effect even more clearly: "The sparrow ate the fly, the eagle the sparrow, the bear the eagle, the lion the bear, and I the lion." In this odd remake of the lady who swallowed the fly, we can see that each clause after the first is missing its verb. Looking at the second clause in isolation, we would have no idea what was going on. We know there is an eagle and a sparrow, but we have no idea how they are related or what they are doing. This is because the verb ate has been elided from the clause, since it can be understood from the first clause that the verb should be mentally inserted between the animals of each clause. Through the creation of a parallel structure like we see here, ellipsis allows us to omit words which would be repeated, and make the sentence far more efficient. One could include the verb in every clause and still be grammatically correct, but the elided version of the sentence sounds better and conveys the important information more effectively.
Ellipsis
As was the case for the rhetorical device parenthesis, most people know something about ellipsis, but not through its use in rhetoric. As we recall from a previous article, the paired punctuation marks parentheses are widely known and used, while their related but distinct rhetorical partner parenthesis is virtually unheard of. All of us know ellipses, perhaps by another name like infinity dots, because the three little periods in a row (...) are very common in informal prose, and even have many proper uses in formal writing. These are used to suggest that something is missing, and also perhaps that a given thought continues beyond the words on the page. The rhetorical use of the term is related, but it has other aspects which are quite distinct, and ellipses (the punctuation marks) are not even necessary for its construction.
In rhetoric, ellipsis refers to omission of words which are technically required by a given sentence, but which can be omitted without losing the sense of the sentence. In the following example, there are two very subtle uses of ellipsis: "The jail still held the heart I lost and the finger I stole." Although this is an odd sentence, it reads smoothly and looks completely correct in a conventional way; so, where is the ellipsis? Read the first part of the sentence, and narrow in on the phrase "the heart I lost." Is there a word missing here? Compare that phrase to the following one with exactly the same meaning: "the heart that I lost." After seeing the modified version, the ellipsis of the first example becomes clear. That is missing in the first sentence in two different places, before both occurrences of I. We tend not to notice it is missing because this kind of shortcut is very common in English, but just because it is understood to be there does not mean it is actually present. As a result, we have a very common and very brief case of ellipsis.In the example above, the effects of ellipsis are not completely obvious, but they are present nonetheless. Read the sentence through once the way it is presented in the quoted example, and once with the missing thats inserted in their proper places. Do you notice any difference? Comparatively, the example which uses ellipsis is more compact and powerful because it eliminates words which have no real bearing on the sense of the sentence. English is full of small blocky words which need to be inserted into sentences to make them work grammatically, but often at the price of decreased euphony (pleasant-soundingness). Ellipsis allows us to eliminate some of these very common recurring words to smooth out the sound of our prose, with the additional effect of cutting the number of words in total and thus placing more emphasis on the important words in a given sentence.
In a more obvious but no less comprehensible example of ellipsis, we can see the chopping effect even more clearly: "The sparrow ate the fly, the eagle the sparrow, the bear the eagle, the lion the bear, and I the lion." In this odd remake of the lady who swallowed the fly, we can see that each clause after the first is missing its verb. Looking at the second clause in isolation, we would have no idea what was going on. We know there is an eagle and a sparrow, but we have no idea how they are related or what they are doing. This is because the verb ate has been elided from the clause, since it can be understood from the first clause that the verb should be mentally inserted between the animals of each clause. Through the creation of a parallel structure like we see here, ellipsis allows us to omit words which would be repeated, and make the sentence far more efficient. One could include the verb in every clause and still be grammatically correct, but the elided version of the sentence sounds better and conveys the important information more effectively.