Literature wonks. Writer hacks. Speaker geeks. Rejoice.
So I bummed this book off a neighbor who is a fellow homeschooler. It’s a book onclassic English rhetoric. Or verbal style.
She originally pulled it off her shelf to show me because of the name of the author:Ward Farnsworth.
Not an exact rendering of my last name (it’s Farnworth, no “s”). And that’s not pretentious posturing on my part — it has been that way for generations.
But it didn’t really matter who wrote the book. I fell in love with it on the spot.
Each chapter is devoted to a figure of speech like anaphora, chiasmus, and litotes That may sound like non-sense to you, but they are really just fancy words for rhetorical devices you’ll easily recognize.
Furthermore, each device is broken down into sub-species, complete with examples from notable sources like Shakespeare, Churchill, Chesterton, and the Bible (and I threw in a few by Tupac Shukar, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Bob Dylan).
