Wallace and Links

AP Language. Thu, Aug 13th, 2015 at 11:09 am

Themes: Argument, David Foster Wallace, This is Water

Great discussions over the past few days. Here are a few sources we’ll get to tomorrow:

The Forest of Rhetoric will be our go-to site for information about rhetorical devices, techniques, and history. A wonderful rabbit hole.

Etymonline should be bookmarked on all of your devices; knowing the etymology of a word can make it more memorable, and a working familiarity with roots and such makes figuring out the meaning of words much more precise.

From the board today:

The following contribute to the tone of a work. Know them. We’ll discuss more tomorrow.

• Diction
• Imagery
• Detail
• Figurative language
• Syntax
• Metonymy
• Synechdoche
• Euphemism/dysphemism

If you lost your copy of David Foster Wallace’s speech to the graduates at Kenyon College, I found another transcript here. ((Please note that his language is occasionally not school appropriate; I edited the copies handed out in class, but (of course) these sources are not so edited. We’ll continue to discuss his language, as it is vital to understanding.))

Audio of the speech:

An interpretation:

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