Our words, actions, and diplomatic efforts should be aimed at trying to achieve pragmatic goals rather than creating rhetorical effect.
It is always much easier, I have discovered, to make people cry or gasp than to make them think.
Words impress me. If a man can speak eloquently and beautifully to me, I just melt on the floor.
George Moore wrote brilliant English until he discovered grammar.
Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.
Few speeches which have produced an electrical effect on an audience can bear the colorless photography of a printed record.
5th Earl of Rosebery
Certain individual words do possess more pitch, more radiance, more shazam! than others, but it's the way words are juxtaposed with other words in a phrase or sentence that can create magic. Perhaps literally.
Analogies are figures intended to serve as fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent toys if they fail.
An underestimated element in poetry, that reading aloud makes clear, is the pause. I mean especially the force of a pause or a couple of pauses close together, contrasted with a longer unit of grammar.
We learn about MLK's 'I Have a Dream' speech. Take that same speech and put it in the voice of a woman. Would it be as inspirational? Would it have as much gravitas to it?
Hypotyposis is the rhetorical effect by which words succeed in rendering a visual scene.
The political value of a word must be measured not in terms of its linguistic coherence but in the way people use it.
The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.
[On Italian:] One may almost call it a language that talks of itself, and always seems more witty than its speakers.
People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.
So there are all kinds of things that grammarian purists would argue are awkward forms of speech and sometimes they are intentional for rhetorical effect and sometimes it's the way people chose to write at the time. Inerrancy isn't interested in any of those kinds of things.
What a poor appearance the tales of poets make when stripped of the colours which music puts upon them, and recited in simple prose.
