Advanced Delivery

Why This Matters

The evaluator scores rhetorical technique as its own category. Structure and evidence build the argument's skeleton — rhetorical devices are what make an audience actually feel the case being made, not just understand it intellectually.

This Week's Exercise

1. Find one place in your speech where you list three related ideas, and rewrite it as a deliberate tricolon — three parallel phrases in a row, building in weight.
2. Identify your speech's most important sentence, and try beginning two or three consecutive sentences the same way (anaphora) to build toward it.
3. Look for one place where you can flip a phrase's structure back on itself for contrast — chiasmus, used sparingly, lands hard exactly because it's rare.
4. Read the revised passages out loud. If a rhetorical device doesn't sound natural when spoken, simplify it — a device that calls attention to itself instead of the point has failed.