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The Elements of Eloquence

Overview

Subtitled How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase, a tour of the classical figures of rhetoric, one short chapter each: alliteration, chiasmus, anaphora, hyperbaton, tricolon, and some forty others. Forsyth shows the same figure at work in Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Churchill, pop lyrics, and advertising, and argues that the memorable lines of English are memorable because of their shape rather than their content. He is, as usual, funny throughout.

Notes

A book about how persuasion works at the level of the sentence, which is a subject anyone who argues for a living, or for fun, ought to understand. Half the quotations that people mistake for wisdom are tricolons, and knowing that is a small defence against them. It is also the best short answer to why some true things sound false and some false things sound true, which bears on every thinking tool in this vault.

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