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Title: Figures of Speech: Sixty Ways to Turn a Phrase by Arthur Quinn ISBN: 1-880393-02-6 Publisher: Hermagoras Pr Pub. Date: October, 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.8 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Truly worth it's weight in gold
Comment: "Figures of Speech: 60 ways to turn a phrase," by Arthur Quinn (Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley) is truly worth it's weight in gold. This book is not a stuffy academic classroom text...it is a sleek, extremely funny and stimulating resource that will undoubtedly add tremendous value to your knowledge of writing the "Queen's English." Moreover, Professor Quinn's book is super provocative, superbly written and succinct...allowing the reader to go cover to cover in a few short hours.
Quinn challenges the reader..."We are confronted, inescapably, with the intoxicating possibility that we can make language do for us almost anything we want." In other words, the author "thinks outside the box" long before it became fashionable to do so. I'll never forget a groundbreaking banner front-page headline in the New York Daily News back in the 1970's, it read, "We Wuz Robbed!" The headline reported that masked gunmen broke into the payroll office and stole millions in typical New York City lingo. Apparently the editors in the Daily News Building agreed with Quinn's approach to effective writing that "style, is like a frog: you can dissect the thing, but it somehow dies in the process."
Each chapter in this marvelous book is short and compact. My favorite chapters include, Missing Links and Headless Horsemen, Man Bites Dog and Reds in the Red. In a nutshell, Quinn demands that we navigate the jungles of style creatively and includes many figures of speech through out his book to stimulate the learning process. Overall, this book is a joy to read. In the words of the author, "language becomes a prison house only poets can escape...if we do not reject any strict distinctions between ordinary usage and figures of speech."
Bert Ruiz
Rating: 5
Summary: Asyndeton to Zeugma: A Guided Tour of Colorful Language
Comment: "A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms" provides a more complete study, but "Figures of Speech" is more user-friendly, more entertaining, more compact, more useful. "Handlist" proved to be more scholarly, "Figures" more practical. "Handlist" arranges the figures alphabetically, "Figures" by type. "Handlist" gives a few examples, "Figures" many. I found the examples in "Figures" to be lyrical, the commentaries whimsical, the results educational.
Rating: 4
Summary: A good introduction to rhetoric
Comment: If I were to design high school cirrculums, rhetoric and logic would be a required subject, perhaps titled (un)creatively as "Survival skills for the Real World or How Not to Be Duped"
Quinn's book Figures of Speech would be one quite satisfactory text. The strength of the book is in its examples, the variety of sources. For example, asyndeton in a series of nouns is illustrated by quotes from the scripture, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Arnold, Darwin, Proust ... He illustrates asyndeton in series of clauses; in series of nouns; at the beginning, middle or end of a sentence. He warns of the effect of overusing the figure ... in short, without ever become boring, he shows you how to flush out a hiding asyndeton anywhere.
For those of you not educated under my ideal plan - asyndeton is the omission of conjunctions. Okay, this particular figure of speech may not effect your gullibility but I happened to like the examples given.
This book is only introductory but as such it is excellent. It is sufficiently slender and diverse to provide basic information without intimidating the reader with the plethora of classical rhetorical devices.
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Title: A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms by Richard A. Lanham ISBN: 0520076699 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: January, 1992 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: A Rulebook for Arguments by Anthony Weston ISBN: 0872205525 Publisher: Hackett Publishing Co. Pub. Date: January, 2001 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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Title: Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student by Edward P. J. Corbett, Robert J. Connors ISBN: 0195115422 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: July, 1998 List Price(USD): $56.95 |
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Title: Thinking from A to Z by Nigel Warburton ISBN: 0415222818 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: June, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle by Aristotle ISBN: 0075546027 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages Pub. Date: December, 1984 List Price(USD): $9.25 |
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